Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/accessories/0,39100116,49300905,00.htm

Reviewed 5 February 2009

Reviewed by Rich Brown

ATI has provided some staunch competition on the 3D-card front over the past six months or so, but, with the dual-chip GeForce GTX 295, Nvidia has raced back to the top of the performance pile.

At around £420, the GTX 295 is aimed at serious PC gamers, but it also provides the best value among high-end boards. This card requires a beefy PC to run it as a result of significant power demands but, for anyone with the financial and electrical wherewithal to put the GTX 295 to work, you'll enjoy the best 3D hardware currently on offer.

Like its primary competition, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, the GTX 295 uses the familiar two-chips, one-card model we've seen from both Nvidia and ATI in the past. The 4870 X2 has been a popular component in a number of recent high-end gaming PCs, and, with support for multiple graphics chips and graphics cards so prevalent in PCs these days, these dual-chip cards provide gamers with a relatively easy way to set up a quad-GPU configuration.

The popularity of ATI's card has to do with the fact that it outperformed Nvidia's previous high-end behemoth, the single-chip GeForce GTX 280, and also cost less. The GTX 295 closes both of those gaps, and also offers some noticeable power-consumption savings.

Comparing the speed and specs of the GTX 295 and 4870 X2, it might, at first glance, seem that the Radeon has the engineering advantage over the Nvidia card. Nvidia uses slower, older RAM and less of it (1792MB of 2.0GHz DDR3, compared to the 4870 X2's 2GB of 3.66GHz DDR5). Both its core clock speed (576MHz compared to 750MHz) and the number of stream processors -- the processing pipelines on the chip that handle various kinds of data requests simultaneously -- (240 compared to 800) are lower as well. We suspect that the Nvidia card benefits from two less obvious advantages that help its performance.

One is the manufacturing process. The GTX 295 uses two 55nm (nanometre) GTX 200 graphics chips, and cramming two of the older 65nm GTX 200 chips onto one card would have been a power-consumption nightmare. We also have no information from ATI on the speed of its stream processors. Our suspicion is that they're significantly slower than the 1.24GHz stream clock on each chip in the GTX 295.

For some background on our 3D-card testing methodology, we picked our test resolutions to correspond with the native resolutions of 19-inch, 22-inch, and 24-inch widescreen LCDs. The only oddball was Crysis, which, for some reason, will support the 16:9 aspect ratio common to HDTVs, but not 16:10, common to widescreen PC displays. These being the highest-end 3D cards on the market, we also picked the highest-possible image-quality settings for each game, with the exception of anti-aliasing. For AA we kept to 8x and avoided chip-specific anti-aliasing settings wherever possible, although the GTX 295 can hit up to 16x AA, depending on the game. We made a custom time demo for Left 4 Dead, but, in all other cases, we used built-in benchmarks, or, in the case of Crysis, the downloadable Assault Harbor time demo included with Mad Boris' Crysis benchmarking tool.

Regardless of the technical explanation, the GTX 295 card was simply faster than the Asus EAH 4870 X2 card on almost all of our 3D gaming tests. The only exception was a 1-frame advantage for the Asus card on the 1,440x900-pixel Left 4 Dead test. In fairness, the GTX 295 didn't win by embarrassing margins either, but the Far Cry 2 scores, in particular, were large enough to be noticeable. Given the convincing lead of the GTX 295 across multiple game engines, in both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10, and at multiple resolutions, we're comfortable with recommending it as the top single card you can buy.

We're also happy to point out that the GTX 295 is relatively power-efficient compared with the Asus card. We say 'relatively', because Nvidia's card still consumes more than 400W under load. That's more power draw for a 3D card alone than that required by most budget desktops.

This relative efficiency is another benefit of moving the GTX 200 chip to the 55nm manufacturing process mentioned above. The GTX 295 requires one six-pin and one eight-pin connection to your PC's power supply, and, because we'd recommend a 750W or better power supply to go with this card, we can't exactly argue that it's the greenest component out there. But, if you must spend £400 or so on a top-end 3D card, the GTX 295 is at least greener than its competition.

There is, of course, more to the story of the GTX 295, and graphics cards in general. Nvidia has been particularly vocal about the capabilities of its 3D cards beyond mere triangle processing. For example, Nvidia has made a physics driver available to allow support for its PhysX accelerated game physics software in the PC version of Mirror's Edge. The GTX 295 was able to handle the added processing work without a hitch, but we can't say we found the added effects that worthwhile. Yes, cloth and particle effects, like shattering glass and smoke, behaved more realistically, bouncing off surfaces and responding to your actions. But the added effects rarely made more than a cosmetic improvement to the game experience, and, even then, they felt tacked on to the Mirror's Edge world (which already has a modular, impersonal feel).

That's not to say we're against PhysX, accelerated game physics in general, or Nvidia's other efforts to differentiate its hardware beyond simple frame rates. What we'll call the parallel-programming effort, as represented by Nvidia's CUDA, Apple's OpenCL, ATI's Stream processing, and Microsoft's forthcoming parallel-computing support in Windows 7, via DirectX 11, will probably affect commonly used software in the coming years, and we're excited to see what develops. But, while Nvidia and ATI both offer some parallel processing in dribs and drabs now, we have yet to see an implementation of this capability that drives us toward one vendor's hardware over another's.

Finally, home-cinema enthusiasts (and even some PC LCD owners) will be glad to know that, as with our engineering sample, all of the retail GTX 295 boards ship with two DVI outs and an HDMI output. You still need to wire the audio signal from your PC's digital output to the card itself (a hassle ATI has avoided by integrating an audio chip into all of its new 3D cards), but, once that's done, connecting the GTX 295 to an HDTV or a projector should be simple.

Conclusion
With the GeForce GTX 295, Nvidia has snatched back it's lead from ATI in the 3D-card arena. The GTX 295 makes significant power demands, but represents good value for money, and those who stump up the cash will enjoy the best 3D hardware currently available.

Additional editing by Charles Kloet