On Thursday December 18th NVIDIA announced the up and coming release of a new hybrid GPU, the GeForce GTX 295 card. The GeForce GTX 295 is poised to replace the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 as the fastest GPU on the planet when it releases shortly after the first day of the year. The photos supplied to us of the GeForce GTX 295 are of an NVIDIA reference design. It's almost two GeForce GTX 260's in one pack, by almost we mean it is a hybrid GPU that has most of the features of a dual GeForce GTX 260 card, but has some improvements that resemble the GeForce GTX 280 edition. And as far as NVIDIA is concerned this GeForce GTX 295 will reclaim the performance crown with ease. - Bjorn3D

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Dual GT200 Design Preview

The GPU sports two dual link DVI and one HDMI on the familiar dual slot cooler we've all become used to. The reference model sports an NVIDIA logo and the fan design has changed. We can't wait to see what the fan does for cooling the dual GPU setup. Dual GPU video cards have been known to have heat issues and it looks like NVIDIA has addressed the issues with a new fan design. In addition to the fan the top of the GPU looks to be louvered to help release the heat from this graphics powerhouse. From what we can tell your going to be able to run two of these beauties in Vista and experience some quad SLI goodness.

The GPU frequency of 576MHz is the same as the GeForce GTX 260, as is the shaders and memory speed, and it still sports a 448-bit memory interface but it's a dual 448-bit interface. We can't help but think that it would perform a little better if it had full duo 512-bit interface. Maybe that's a hint of things to come. Maybe a dual GeForce GTX 280 goodness anyone? Both cards sport GDDR3 memory and the GeForce GTX 295 sports twice as much as the GeForce GTX 260 and twice 240 shaders. We would suspect these changes were needed to make the GeForce GTX 295 take it's rightful place as fastest GPU on the planet.

Throw two of these puppies on an SLI board and you better be ready for some serious SLI goodness. And if we are understanding NVIDIA right not only can you have multi GPU graphics and PhysX on one card you can also have one or two of these beauties installed and use your older GPU as a dedicated PhysX card. That will free up this powerhouse to handle graphics and leave the PhysX to the dedicated PhysX card freeing up even more graphics goodness. And with the introduction of the new ForceWare 180.x drivers you can now drive two monitors while in SLI mode, or you can split these up one for gaming and one free of use.

Now we mentioned earlier the ability to use one GPU as the primary GPU and another GPU as the PhysX card. We've been privvy to some things that we can't tell you about just yet, but take our word for it if you plan on some of the hottest titles up and coming you might want to consider keeping the old GPU and using it for a dedicated PhysX card. This will work on non-SLI boards as well as SLI boards with no SLI bridge required. So you CrossFire board owners, dust off that old GPU and fire up your PhysX engines. Soon you'll be seeing Mirror's Edge on the market, it's going to be the first full fledged PhysX game on the market.