NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Preview @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Preview - NVIDIA has designed a dual-GPU, albeit dual-PCB, video card to compete with AMD’s wildly successful Radeon HD 4870 X2 card that is a dual-GPU yet single-PCB design. We preview this new video card and explore gameplay performance in three popular and graphically demanding games. Old GX2 series owners are already backing away.

NVIDIA has definitely made this a worthy competitor to the Radeon HD 4870 X2. But in no way is this a “4870 X2 killer.” From our narrow look here today with what is likely to be an immature driver set, the GTX 295 is matching the 4870 X2 in gameplay. Maybe it will best it in a month, but I would not bet on it.
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Great preview. The card look like it has alot of potential but i think it is a bit late in the game.

The low memory is killing the performance at high resolution.
 
You mentioned that there is a displayport on the back, but the nvidia specs state it is an HDMI port, could you please clarify this?
 
Six month too late just to match the performance? Did I see it right? The X2 has a higher frame rate in Crysis Warhead?
 
Not too surprising really. Now I'm interested to see the price/performance of the new 55nm single pcb solution as well.
 
Xpletive said:
You mentioned that there is a displayport on the back, but the nvidia specs state it is an HDMI port, could you please clarify this?
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Yeah, I thought the same thing, and there seems to be some confusion over this. Looks like HDMI to me too. Got a mail into NVIDIA. Brent went to sleep, he has the card, and I don't want to wake him up over something trivial after working 24 hours.
 
just from looking at the cooler it seems like it might get fairly warm, does it run loud or are they just making the heatsink so it isnt a hair dryer when running on high like my 4870
 
Nice preview, seems to be right on par with the 4870x2 but might be a tad better.
 
This card is really a testament to how well the 4870x2 was designed. While this card is an excellent competitor, it's too little too late. There's no denying how impressive ATi has been during this generation, even though my 8800 GT is still running strong. :)
 
What I really like about this is that it will push prices of current cards lower and hopefully make the GTX280 even cheaper, I play at 1920 X 1200 and the GTX280 is good enough for me but a second one would be nice :)
 
Nice preview. Too bad they did not add more memory, but that might have added to the final cost of the card and they wanted to stay at the $400.00 mark. Anyway at least I can hold on to my 280 GTX SLI for a while longer.
 
Nice review, I honestly think that if they had given it the 1GB if memory the 280 has it would have pulled ahead of the X2. However seeing the X2 pull of those frame rates in Crysis was very surprising to me to say the least.
 
I think I am just gonna sit on my 4870 and maybe add a second one at some point for crossfire. I can wait until the real nextgen stuff comes out. This really is a drag though cause I was hoping for some monster GPU to put in my new i7 build that is coming up soon. Damnit Foxconn release the damn Bloodrage already heh...
 
Great preview. SO from the pictures, the PCB's are on the outside (top and bottom) of the unit, with the cooling apparatus in between? Very interesting way of doing it.
 
All Nvidia cards take a huge punch the moment you step up to 8xAA. I wouldn't mind seeing what Nvidia has to say about that, considering their "Please benchmark our cards using 4xAA" message to the press a few years back and how the ATI cards for once don't bottom out once you step up.
 
With the appearance of GTX 295, HD 4870 X2 and HD 4850 X2, I now declare that this is the beginning of the multi GPU era.

Btw I'm still waiting for people to post that [H] is biased towards AMD ;)
 
Premature drivers most likely. It should improve greatly once Nvidia optimizes the cards performance. We won't have to worry about AMD to much longer anyways. There stock just keeps on falling ;). They have enough for probably 2 more revisions of there CPU/GPU line tops before they are tapped out of cash.
 
The GTX295 is just terrible. They had potential to blow AMD out of the water atleast until the new 40nm chips come out, but they restricted the bandwidth on the memory too much, and limited it to only 896mb per core. What a waste of a card.
 
DarkLegacy said:
Premature drivers most likely. It should improve greatly once Nvidia optimizes the cards performance. We won't have to worry about AMD to much longer anyways. There stock just keeps on falling ;). They have enough for probably 2 more revisions of there CPU/GPU line tops before they are tapped out of cash.
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do you wish it or smthng ? cause this price is result of great competition :rolleyes:
 
The 8xAA performance is probably a bug and hopefully fixed in upcoming drivers.

From what I've seen the GTX260 SLI does not take a nosedive when using 8xAA, the GTX295 shouldn't be different
 
BASIC said:
The GTX295 is just terrible. They had potential to blow AMD out of the water atleast until the new 40nm chips come out, but they restricted the bandwidth on the memory too much, and limited it to only 896mb per core. What a waste of a card.
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If these results aren't due to a buggy driver set then yes, I will agree with this.
 
I don't see how it is a terrible card especially if Nvidia price it under the 4870X2.. :confused:

Sure the memory should ideally have been 1GB with the 512bit bus, but the GTX 295 is still a decent card and as Kyle/ Brent said, the GTX 295 has the better gameplay experience!!

did you hear that kadozer and algmunif?Better gameplay experience :p

Plus here's hoping that the GTX 285 is priced at the same price as the 4870 1GB and the GTX 260 216 at the same price as the 4850. That should really worry ATI... :D

Anyways hello EVGA step up for me when the 295 gets announced!
 
DarkLegacy said:
Premature drivers most likely. It should improve greatly once Nvidia optimizes the cards performance. We won't have to worry about AMD to much longer anyways. There stock just keeps on falling ;). They have enough for probably 2 more revisions of there CPU/GPU line tops before they are tapped out of cash.
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Partially premature sure. But I think we're seeing pretty much what it can do. It'll more or less match the 4870X2. It'll most likely be a slug fest where they'll swap the lead back and forth based on the game.

And as for wishing AMD to be gone have you lost it? Why would we want that? GTX295 matching 4870X2 performance is great for the consumer because it'll cause a price war just like the HD4870 caused when it was first released. Oh wait...maybe you like spending $600 on a video card.
 
eric66 said:
do you wish it or smthng ? cause this price is result of great competition :rolleyes:
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I completely agree, i wish success to both ATI and Nvidia. Their never ending war will result only in better deals for us. I wish they keep on fighting...we don't want another Monopolysoft..do we?
 
tejas said:
I don't see how it is a terrible card especially if Nvidia price it under the 4870X2.. :confused:

Sure the memory should ideally have been 1GB with the 512bit bus, but the GTX 295 is still a decent card and as Kyle/ Brent said, the GTX 295 has the better gameplay experience!!

did you hear that kadozer and algmunif?Better gameplay experience :p

Plus here's hoping that the GTX 285 is priced at the same price as the 4870 1GB and the GTX 260 216 at the same price as the 4850. That should really worry ATI... :D

Anyways hello EVGA step up for me when the 295 gets announced!
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it is not under there are 4870x2 available at the same price or unde at newegg (i am not even counting mir)
 
tejas said:
I don't see how it is a terrible card especially if Nvidia price it under the 4870X2.. :confused:

Sure the memory should ideally have been 1GB with the 512bit bus, but the GTX 295 is still a decent card and as Kyle/ Brent said, the GTX 295 has the better gameplay experience!!

did you hear that kadozer and algmunif?Better gameplay experience :p

Plus here's hoping that the GTX 285 is priced at the same price as the 4870 1GB and the GTX 260 216 at the same price as the 4850. That should really worry ATI... :D

Anyways hello EVGA step up for me when the 295 gets announced!
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What better gameplay experience?

Far Cry 2:
However, the game was playable at the same settings on both cards so the gaming experience was identical between the two video cards. We also tried 8X AA on the 4870 X2, and while this setting was also not playable, it wasn’t as slow as the GTX 295 was at 8X AA.
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Crysis Warhead:
Suffice it to say, the game felt and played the same between both video cards. Taking the Pepsi Challenge would leave most folks not recognizing any differences between the two systems.
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Their conclusion:
NVIDIA has definitely made this a worthy competitor to the Radeon HD 4870 X2. But in no way is this a “4870 X2 killer.” From our narrow look here today with what is likely to be an immature driver set, the GTX 295 is matching the 4870 X2 in gameplay. Maybe it will best it in a month, but I would not bet on it.
Click to expand...

Only in Fallout 3 they said that the GTX 295 has a better gameplay experience but that is caused by a bug on the HD 4870 X2, not the performance:
There are a few problems though with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 that resulted in us having a better gameplay experience on the GeForce GTX 295. I would certainly call them bugs, and future drivers may fix these, which might turn the tables on our conclusions here for this game title.
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actually dark legacy is right.. AMD is more screwed than GM and Chrysler put together..

I really doubt that the US taxpayer wants to bail AMD out except the small number of AMD fanboys... and they do not possess the capital to even help AMD pay the debts on the loans needed for the ATI acquisition...
 
maybe another vendor will change it to 1GB of ram that makes nvidia gfx cards . But most likely they found it was not worth the price difference that a bit more ram would cost
 
I look forward to the final evaluation of the retail cards. I liked your initial preview of your experiences with the card being quieter and cooler than the X2.

So does air also blow out from the top?
 
There are other threads to talk about the death of AMD. (And wishing for it or against it won't change anything) However, lets keep this one on topic!
 
kuyaglen said:
I look forward to the final evaluation of the retail cards. I liked your initial preview of your experiences with the card being quieter and cooler than the X2.

So does air also blow out from the top?
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The card is quieter because it doesn't move as much air as the X2, the card itselt is very hot but until more infos are available, we won't know which card is actually hotter.

We also found that it runs pretty darn quiet while gaming. Audible, but not as loud as the 4870 X2. We also noticed that while the video card itself gets very hot, it doesn’t blow as much hot air with as much force as the 4870 X2 does. Those are my initial noise and heat impressions using the card, and they are positive, but those things might change between here and final hardware. Undoubtedly though, this GTX 295 represents a sure step above the GX2 series in terms of how elegantly the cooling solution had been rethought.
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With the dual GPU cards having become a regular addition to the lineups of AMD and NVIDIA it makes me wonder when we might see a dual core GPU....
 
visionviper said:
With the dual GPU cards having become a regular addition to the lineups of AMD and NVIDIA it makes me wonder when we might see a dual core GPU....
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A while. Die sizes and failure rates would be horrible. Also you gain some thermal benefits to cooling by having them on seperate dies.
 
My knowledge regarding GPU's is very narrow, but that was said many times by many people.. you can't go wrong with GPU atm...From my point of view Nvidia rushed to fill the gap in the hierarchy of GPU's where 4870X2 is the king. Next year that crown will be shared on high end market. It's just your expectations went a bit too far. I liked what other guy said in other thread, something like it's just a matter of taste which logo suits you best..it's your pick because both are very powerful and go neck to neck..
 
visionviper said:
With the dual GPU cards having become a regular addition to the lineups of AMD and NVIDIA it makes me wonder when we might see a dual core GPU....
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A single GPU die already has a lot of cores in it (240 Stream processors). Using multiple GPUs will give the benefit of a smaller die that results to a better yield. What they should do is, use a technology that can make a multi GPU card work as if it is a single GPU card.
 
Xpletive said:
You mentioned that there is a displayport on the back, but the nvidia specs state it is an HDMI port, could you please clarify this?
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I'm crazy apparently, don't know where I got display port from, the connector is HDMI. It still stands though, can drive 3 displays in multi-mon mode from the card. Fixed.
 
tejas said:
I don't see how it is a terrible card especially if Nvidia price it under the 4870X2.. :confused:
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Except that as it stands, the 4870 X2 is cheaper right now.

Newegg has them under 499, the msrp of the gtx 295. Of course, we'll see how the actual street prices settle out once the 295 is released.
 
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