Now that we have some hardware in our hands and NVIDIA has just formally launched the GeForce GTX 295, we are very interested in putting it to the test. NVIDIA's bid to reclaim the halo is quite an interesting one. If you'll remember from our earlier article on the hardware, the GeForce GTX 295 is a dual GPU card that features two chips that combine aspects of the GeForce GTX 280 and the GeForce GTX 260. The expectation should be that this board will fall between those two in SLI mode. This hybrid design gives it lots of shader horsepower with less memory and raw pixel pushing capability than the GeForce GTX 280 in SLI config, so performance should be in quite close in some games. - AnandTech

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Multi-GPU Graphics Review

We have also got another part coming down the pipe from NVIDIA. The GeForce GTX 285 card is a 55nm part that amounts to an overclocked GeForce GTX 280. Although we don't have any in house yet, this new card was announced on the 8th and will be available for purchase on the 15th of January. The GeForce GTX 295 performed pretty much where we expected, just between the GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 in SLI setups. In some games, the GeForce GTX 295 performed very nearly at single card performance, indicating a some bottleneck somewhere in memory bandwidth or with the raster operating units.

Although in cases where shader performance was more important we saw more separation, but the clock speed, memory bandwidth and raster units advantage of the SLI based GeForce GTX 280 system consistently outpaced the GeForce GTX 295 board by a good margin. Comparing to AMD, it's clear that NVIDIA has recaptured the halo product at least in just the majority of tests we ran in this snapshot of performance. We are noticing a trend that has some games heavily favoring one architecture or another, which makes general recommendations harder than usual. But the advantage this time around is certainly with NVIDIA.

The highest performing solution we tested is still the SLI based GeForce GTX 280 setup. And when the GeForce GTX 285 makes its way out, within an SLI config it will very likely take that crown. We do have yet to test quad performance as we only have one card. We suspect scaling similar to past experience with quad, but we will certainly bring you an update as soon as we are able. Now what we really need are some mid-range GT200 based parts.