NVIDIA GTX 295 Brings the Pain and Performance 238
Vigile writes "Dual-GPU graphics cards are all the rage and it was a pair of RV770 cores that AMD had to use in order to best the likes of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280. This time NVIDIA has the goal of taking back the performance crown and the GeForce GTX 295 essentially takes two of the GT200 GPUs used on the GTX 280, shrinks them from 65nm to 55nm, and puts them on a single card. The results are pretty impressive and the GTX 295 dominates in the benchmarks with a price tag of $499."
Re:Really, though. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Holiday Shopping (Score:1, Informative)
No, just too late. It will not be available until January 8th. My guess is that NVidia wants all you gamers to hold your chrismas pennies until that date.
So, no hardware in your stockings this year!
It's great that there's money for this stuff... (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just about the graphics. GPUs are being called upon to do much more, from AI to Physics, to folding@home. Even encoding and decoding audio and video formats.
Re:Really, though. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ugh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Really, though. (Score:5, Informative)
GTA4 is processor dependent, not GPU dependent, cos it's the crappiest console port we've seen in years.
Re:This is all so 1998 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ugh (Score:5, Informative)
Somehow most previews don't even mention power consumption.
Had you RTFA properly, folks have mentioned that card is not yet officially out and nVidia asked to withheld further details as BIOS might still get tweaked.
By that logic everything which does not start to burn is power efficient...
This is not an absolute metric (or is it "yardic" in US?). I presume they compare it to 4870 on which the infamous DDR5 alone - even when idle - draws whooping 40W [techpowerup.com]. 4870x2 has already tweaked factory BIOS and yet twice more DDR5 still consumes same 40W. Yes - RAM alone consumes 40W.
Re:Drivers drivers drivers (Score:1, Informative)
(this is the most reasonable choice if you have more than 1 GB of RAM),
[citation needed]
and the non-free drivers don't support that configuration...
The *installer* doesn't support that configuration, but it's pretty easy to unpack the driver package and install it yourself. It works fine.
Taking back the performance crown? (Score:4, Informative)
Nvidia never lost the performance crown. AMD did not even bothered to compete with Nvidia for performance at the high end.
Read this excellent article [anandtech.com].
What AMD did with the RV770 series was to totally pwn everything below the super high end.
When the 4870 was released at $299, it was generally worse than GTX280, but it easily beat the GTX260 which was priced at $399.
When the 4850 was released at $199, it easily matched the 9800GTX which was priced at $249