Just a week before Christmas, NVIDIA allowed us to disclose just some early performance numbers for its next flagship part, the GeForce GTX 295. Because the card was still a few weeks away from release, there were some restrictions of what could be revealed. Today is the day for the GeForce GTX 295 and we're finally able to talk about the card without any restrictions in place. And we will be discussing the card in a lot more detail than we did before and we'll be disclosing performance, in both single use and quad SLI config as well as looking at power consumption and heat. We are sure the main question on most people's mind is whether the GeForce GTX 295 does topple ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2? - Bit-Tech

BFG GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI Twin Config Preview

BFG was the first NVIDIA board vendor to get a final retail GeForce GTX 295 to us ahead of the launch. We'd be lying if we said it was vastly different to the reference GeForce GTX 295 card we've got, but there are some subtle changes in order to incorporate BFG's branding. One question we asked NVIDIA before we published our original article was just how partners were going to brand the card because the heatsink's design would prevent partners from just using massive stickers to differentiate. The area where the NVIDIA arrow was on the reference card has changed slightly with fewer perforations, giving room for card branding.

Despite this though, we can't help but feel the area severely limits what partners can do to the card. Whether or not that is a good thing, of course, is a matter of personal opinion, but we are sure the partners would like a bit more space to differentiate their designs. The board design incorporates an improved heatsink, which NVIDIA says is capable of dissipating more than 289W of power which happens to be the maximum quoted board power for the GeForce GTX 295. This is a massive improvement over the older GeForce 9800 GX2's heatsink from our perspective as that design actually just cooked certain SLI certified mainboards.

So having now spent a lot more time with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295, we can make some more complete conclusions about its existence and position in the market against the AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 video card. In short, it's the fastest graphics card on the planet as of today, but that title isn't undisputed. When AMD launched the Radeon HD 4870 X2 card, it was pretty much an undisputed champion with only one game showing their GeForce GTX 280 as a match for AMD's dual GPU behemoth. With the GeForce GTX 295, we were never going to see those kinds of performance advances, it is all about redressing the balance.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 retakes the title of the fastest graphics board in the world, but it doesn't do it in the emphatic fashion that many were hoping for. We didn't expect NVIDIA to leave the Radeon HD 4870 X2 for dead and it hasn't done that, but what it has done is deliver higher performance in most titles. There are of course, titles where performance between the two is very close, but the big swings goes in NVIDIA's favour. There are still some issues with the quad SLI drivers to iron out, and what we've learned today is that for the most part there is no need for more than two GPU's to play today's games at decent resolutions.

The return on investment diminishes quite spectacularly when you go beyond a couple of GPU's because today's games just aren't intensive enough for there to be clear advantages, but it's nevertheless impressive to see a game maxed out at those ultra widescreen resolutions. Ultimately, it's going to come down to pricing. If there is a gulf between the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and GeForce GTX 295, the Radeon gets our nod but if NVIDIA's partners manage to hit the prices we're being quoted, we'd get the GeForce GTX 295 because of its inherent performance advantage in all but a few scenarios.