Behold... The GTX 295!

Alas, nVidia has taken another leap forward in their GPU development with the release of the GeForce GTX 295. This card is exemplary of everything that nVidia is trying to do with their new CUDA technology, which, unless you've been living under a rock for the last few months, you would know is nVidia's new mutli-GPU technology, allowing for systems with several graphics cards to run at the same time. At this point, the consumer market has made available a quad-SLi configuration, but there are testbeds that exist which run 20, 30 or more Tesla GPUs in tandem.

What makes the GTX 295 so special is the fact that nVidia has crammed two GTX 280 GPUs into one card, along with GDDR3 RAM equivalent to that of the GTX260 (with twice the frame buffer size). Those 480 stream processors, along with a massive frame buffer, allow the GTX 295 to squeeze out 30 FPS on Crysis in DX10 mode with 1900x1200 resolution, 4x AntiAliasing and Anisotropic filtering enabled (all of this with equivalent hardware of course) with a SINGLE CARD!

Now, before you ATi fanboys get in an uproar, the 4870x2 loses to the GTX295 in nearly all benchmarking tests (on a rig constructed by Tom's Hardware). Whilst the 4870x2 has GDDR5 memory, three times the amount of shader processors, and offers 200MB more frame buffer; The GTX 295 still prevails even with those "limitations". The only case where the 4870x2 achieved victory status was in the Crysis test at 2560x1600 resolution. The larger frame buffer allowed the 4870x2 to eek out 15 FPS at this level, whilst the GTX 295 crawls at a mere 2.80 FPS. Overall, however, the GTX 295 puts out an average performance increase of 30.69% over the ATi 4870x2.

The cards themselves are pretty, but very large. One of these will cost you two ventilation slots and a PCI-e slot. Something else I find interesting about the 295 is the free-flowing ventilation slot that this card has. Stacking these up and worrying about cooling is somewhat relieved due to the fact that the fan expels air through the card, rather than just out of it. When these are stacked up in an SLi configuration (in which case you have far too much money on-tap and need to donate some to me), the air moves freely through the cards, up to the CPU heatsink and the main case fan. Impressive, if I do say so myself.

Both cards come at a pricetag of over $500 so you'd better save your pennies if you want one of these behemoths. In my opinion, however, either one would be worth the money (although I would be investing in the nVidia chipset myself). 256 FPS in Dead Space would make me want to cry tears of joy.