Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB & Quad SLI

Rounding up

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 ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. 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, it was pretty much an undisputed champion with only one game showing the 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 – but then neither did we expect them – because the GTX 295 is about redressing the balance. It’s two GPUs vs. two GPUs again, skin on skin, in a fight to the death and, frankly speaking, Nvidia wins that battle by a nose.

It’s significantly faster in a number of titles and there are only a few scenarios where the GeForce GTX 295 is slower – only one of those is what we would call a battering and that’s in Fallout 3 at 2,560 x 1,600. That is, of course, down to the fact that the GT200b GPUs become bandwidth starved at high resolutions with high anti-aliasing enabled.

What’s more, there were other scenarios where the additional shader count made little-to-no difference over a pair of GeForce GTX 260-216 cards and that’s again down to the card being starved of memory bandwidth. Had we still got a pair of working GeForce GTX 260s (192 stream processor versions), we reckon that the GTX 295 wouldn’t be much faster than that configuration in some scenarios, either.

In Quad SLI, we found that there were plenty of areas where there was room for improvement and the memory bandwidth issue cropped up again in Crysis' DX10 mode at high resolution. Scaling just dropped through the floor, despite the GPUs being very capable at 1,920 x 1,200 2xAA or 2,560 x 1,600 0xAA (depending on whether very high or high details were utilised). There were also problems with Quad SLI working in GRID and Far Cry 2’s DirectX 9.0 – the latter doesn’t concern us, but the former does.

With that said though, this implementation of Quad SLI is the best we have seen to date and the number of problems we had were limited to just these two titles. This is unlike what we’ve experienced before and we’ve had quite a history with Quad SLI, right back to its first implementation which was completely broken in almost every way.

Most of these issues can be fixed with driver updates – especially the Quad SLI incompatibilities – but there are some that can’t because they are hardware limitations. The performance tail offs don't happen with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and we believe a lot of this is down to the decision to launch th GTX 295 with a lower than expected memory speed, but it does leave room for board partners to release cards with memory speeds above 2,300MHz in the future. At that speed, some of the GTX 295's memory bandwidth restrictions should be alleviated, but they won't disappear completely.

Pricing in the UK is expected to hit around £400, including VAT, according to the company’s price guidance and this is a little higher than first anticipated. That’s down to the current economic climate though, as the US Dollar is a lot stronger now than it was before Christmas. We’re not convinced that the card will hit £400 despite Nvidia’s best assurances that it will because the company has a history of under-quoting pricing – retailers might push the price up past £420 and if that happens, the decision between the Radeon HD 4870 X2 at £373 and the GeForce GTX 295 becomes a lot more difficult to quantify.

In the US, the MSRP is usually much more accurate and so $499 seems like reasonable value against the Radeon HD 4870 X2. However, AMD has applied a price cut to the Radeon HD 4870 X2 over the last 24 hours, which takes it down to $399 after a $50 mail-in rebate, so in reality it’s now a $449 part. It’s pretty close at those prices and nobody would crucify you for going either way – it’s a matter of personal preference – and if one or more Nvidia partners goes aggressive on that $499 MSRP, we could see some interesting competition.

Final Thoughts...

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 295 retakes the title of the fastest graphics card 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 go 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 GPUs to play any of today’s games at decent resolutions. The return on investment diminishes quite spectacularly when you go beyond a couple of GPUs 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 2,560 x 1,600 running into the engine’s frame rate cap.

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 GTX 295 because of its inherent performance advantage in all but a few scenarios.

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