NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 – a new leader in 3D graphics!

The struggle for the honorable "leadership crown" among single video cards is going on. As is known, AMD has long been committed to the direction implying that its new 3D graphics flagships are made of two video chips of the provisional "middle" class. At the same time, NVIDIA is biased to a more traditional approach adding more transistors and "swelling up the muscles" in its single-chip solutions. However, that does not prevent NVIDIA from releasing dual-chip cards as well, in the periods between the global architectural updates to the graphic processors. The latest development relates to the flagship series GeForce GTX and offers the maximum index "295" the company has ever assigned.

On the example of Zotac GeForce GTX 295 video card which was courteously provided by the company's Moscow representation office for tests, we'll explore the card's exterior, its package bundle, interior arrangement, and the performance of course. Moreover, we'll verify how its performance is scaled depending on the speed of the PCI Express bus, as well as explore the power consumption of the video card in various modes. But - all in good time.

Zotac GTX 295 is shipped in a standard proprietary box which is equipped with a notch to let you look at the video card. Unfortunately, you can't touch the card through the window sealed with plastic. It would be nice to touch, but let's talk about that later. In this case, looking at the video card through the package brings little information - you can only see a black "bar" with holes and the proprietary sticker stating the name of the video card. The front side of the box provides more information – the memory bus width and the overall capacity - 896 bit and 1792 MB, respectively. Divide these values by two to get the right memory capacity and the bus width for each of the two GPUs of which the GeForce GTX 295 is made up of.

The reverse side of the box is not so interesting as the previous one, but here we can find a mini guide on building a Quad SLI system for which one GeForce GTX 295 video card is necessary (marked with a checkmark as available). We would also need the second video card and a motherboard with support for the SLI. As we can see, NVIDIA has provided for the option of merging into a SLI bundle and a new "dual-headed" flagship, which continues the former traditions.

Unlike many other manufacturers of video cards, Zotac is not shy about stating the nominal frequencies of its products. This information is displayed on one of the sides of the box. As you can see, the nominal frequencies of Zotac GTX 295 are equal to the nominal frequencies of GeForce GTX 260, as are the memory bandwidth and its capacity that falls on each of the two video processors. But there are also radical differences, which we'll be exploring a bit later.

Of the system requirements specified on the side of the box, we note the specified minimum rating of the power supply unit which amounts to 680 W (if the CPU Intel Core i7 3.2 GHz is used). We'll verify how these requirements are true to life once we move to the tests and explore the power consumption of Zotac GTX 295 in various modes. We say in advance that the cited figure is justified albeit a bit overstated.

The package bundle of the video card: user's guide, a drivers CD, a CD with 3DMark Vantage, a CD with the game Race Driver: Grid, an HDMI-HDMI cable, two power supply adapters, a DVI/D-Sub cord, a cord to plug in to the SPDIF on the motherboard.

As you can see, all the required items are attached to the video card. The HDMI cable will save time and efforts on plugging in the PC to the projector or a wide-screen panel. With 3DMark Vantage and the game Race Driver: Grid that come as bundled items, you will be able to assess the incredible level of speed of the new product and enjoy the exciting races with the maximum graphics quality and the maximum speed.

Let's see what the new product is like from both the exterior and the interior.

As was already stated, GeForce GTX 295 is some sort of a black "brick". On the front side of the video card, the are three video outputs – two Dual-Link DVI and one HDMI. Unusually, the vent holes are located under the DVI connectors, not above them.

There is nothing remarkable on the front side of the video card except the Zotac's proprietary sticker, let alone the soft-touch cover of the housing. That is why the video card is nice to hold in your hands.

On the reverse side of the video card, we can see the same hole for the turbine's cooler through which the air is sucked in, as well as a number of finer items of the surface assembly. Evidently, the most exciting items – GPU and memory chips - are hidden inside.

On the upper edge of the video card, there are two connectors for additional power supply of the video card and the "exhaust" hole of the cooler opened with no lid. There is a reasonable tradeoff between the rotational speed of the cooler and its noise level. If we draw the heated air in a traditional way – along the card trough the grid on the front panel outside the housing, it would require to increase the RPMs of the cooler substantially, which will inevitably result in the rise of the noise level. At the same time, such powerful video cards are normally installed into systems of matching level where the matter of cooling the interior space has already been solved, and the expulsion of part of the heated air by the video card inside will not result in a substantial change in the temperature balance.

Once we are talking about the cooling of the video card, we start introduction to the interior arrangement of the video card from exploring the cooler's design.

The cooler is some sort of a "sandwich" made up of two aluminum feet with copper cores having heat pipes pressed in, along which heat from the GPU is transferred to the cooling fins located inside the "sandwich".

Thermal contact of the video memory chips and the cooler's feet is provided with thermal spacers. One more copper core on one of the cooler's sides is meant to provide cooling of the switching chip of the PCI Express bus.

The turbine in the "tail" of the cooler sucks air from both sides of the video card and runs it through the cooling ribs. Part of the air, as was stated above, runs into the housing through the upper edge of the cooler, with the other part of the heated air running through the side of the video card where connectors are located, and expelled outside.

The card itself is made up of two halves, on each of which there is one video processor and a matching kit of video memory chips. The PCB design is almost identical, with the difference being only in the left-hand part. On the "half" of GeForce GTX 295 where there is the PCI-Express 16x connector, there is an HDMI connector, a switch of the PCI-E bus, and a NV-Link connector to merge video cards into the Quad-SLI combination, and two DVI connectors on the second one.

On the reverse side, there are no remarkable items on both the "halves".

GeForce GTX 295 bears two GT200b graphic processors made following the 55-nm process technology and not 65-nm like in the previous revisions. As was stated above, their nominal frequencies are identical to the operating frequencies of GT200 set on GeForce GTX 260. But there is one important distinction – the number of streaming processors has not undergone reduction, so each of the GPUs installed have all the 240 computational blocks as it is in the full-featured GTX 280.

Each of the GPUs is equipped with 896 MB of video memory. This capacity is made up of 14 DDR3 chips with 1.0 ns access time and the nominal frequency 1000 MHz (2000 MHz DDR) made by Hynix. This is the nominal frequency the video memory runs. Certainly, the width of the memory bus is 448 bit.

The NVIDIA NF200-P-SLI chip is a switching chip of the PCI Express 2.0 bus.

The NVIDIA NVIO2 chip contains RAMDAC and TDMS blocks and provides image output to the displays.

Let's make some interim conclusions. In terms of design, the GeForce GTX 295 is very similar to GeForce 9800GX2 - it is the same "sandwich" with the cooler positioned in the middle of the cooler. Like its predecessor, the new "dual-headed" GeForce GTX 295 comprises two "halves" merged into the SLI with interior cables. Each of the parts is equipped with the GT200b graphic processor whose operating frequencies and the memory bus width coincide with the GPU settings defined on GeForce GTX 260 video cards. However, the number of streaming processors in the GPU of GeForce GTX 295 amounts to 240 pieces as it is in the higher-end model - GeForce GTX 280. Evidently, due to this combination of factors the performance of one "half" the GeForce GTX 295 should be positioned approximately between GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280. Therefore, the performance of GeForce GTX 295 in full operation should be a bit higher than the performance of GeForce GTX 260 SLI and a bit lower than that for GeForce GTX 280 SLI. We'll now find out how these expectations are justified.

Performance tests

Since GeForce GTX 295 pretends to be the fastest "single" video card, as contenders to the card we'll be using the following video cards – GeForce GTX 280 and a combination of two such cards in the SLI mode, and of course the Radeon HD4870X2. To estimate the efficiency of the "interior" SLI of GeForce GTX 295, we also ran performance tests of one "half" of the card through disabling the SLI settings in the drivers.

Test configuration

On the diagrams, the results for GeForce GTX 280 in the single and "dual" modes are marked in dark green. The results of operation of the "half" of GeForce GTX 295 and in the nominal mode are marked in lettuce green color. Traditionally, the results for Radeon HD4870X2 are shown in red color. The GeForce video cards were tested with drivers of version 181.20, and Radeon HD4870X2 – with Catalyst 8.12.

Tests in 3DMark Vantage, Performance, showed that GeForce GTX 295 indeed grabs the "leadership crown" from the previous king of 3D graphics - Radeon HD4870X2.

If we take the 3DMark estimate regardless of the CPU Score, the advantage of the new product as compared to Radeon HD4870X2 amounts to about 9%. Not so much but quite noticeable and its can't be attributed to the measurement errors. Especially in view of the fact that each percent counts in the struggle for the "crown".

While running tests in 3DMark Vantage, with the graphic settings set to High the advantage of GeForce GTX 295 rises by almost 30%, which is somehow strange. Quite possibly, due to use of the wider memory bus the GeForce GTX 295 when moving to the "hard" graphic mode may gain extra advantage as compared to Radeon HD4870X2. However, the 30% looks somehow dubious.

However, the mode of tests in Extreme 3DMark Vantage draws a final score in running the tests in this application. Indeed, with the rise of "hardness" of the mode the advantage of GeForce GTX 295 over Radeon HD4870X2 is rising. In the Extreme mode, we can see the difference in results for GPU Score of these video cards to be about 12%.

While running the tests in Crysis at low resolution, again we can see that at performance the GeForce GTX 295 takes a lead over Radeon HD4870X2 by 25%.

As the resolution goes up, the difference in results for GeForce GTX 295 and Radeon HD4870X2 somehow goes down, but again remains substantial – about 10% in favor of the new product.

Enabling the VeryHigh graphic mode in Crysis is still quite a hard nut to crack even for the most powerful video cards. In absolute expression, the results for GeForce GTX 295 and Radeon HD4870X2 even at small resolutions go down substantially, but the 10% advantage is anyway left with the new product.

But rise of the resolution proved to be a surprise. The winner among the "single" video card is Radeon HD4870X2, however, GeForce GTX 295 lags just a little bit behind.

Nevertheless, at Far Cry 2 with the Ultra graphic quality settings, GeForce GTX 295 versus Radeon HD4870X2 takes a sure lead and its advantage amounts to about 15-20%. Interestingly, in this test the results of the new product closely approach those for GeForce GTX 280 in the SLI mode - and that is for the "single" video card!

At Race Driver: Grid, GeForce GTX 295 first takes a lead over Radeon HD4870X2 at low resolutions, but then the alignment of forces in this pair gets reversed, and Radeon HD4870X2 proves to be the winner. However, the difference in results by a few percents can't be regarded as substantial, especially because the video cards show quite a comfortable FPS in this game.

GeForce GTX 295 Performance Scalability

Now, based on the above results, we can find out how effectively the two "halves" of GeForce GTX 295 operate in the SLI combination. As the reference point, we take the results shown by one of the "halves" of GeForce GTX 295 (the SLI mode disabled) and compare them versus the performance of the same video card but this time in the mode of maximum performance (with the SLI mode enabled). The below diagram displays the performance boost with the "interior" SLI mode enabled for GeForce GTX 295.

As was expected, in the 3DMark Vantage synthetic tests, the scalability of the "interior" SLI fluctuates within 80%-90%, which is quite close to the theoretical maximum which amounts to 100%. At Crysis, the efficiency of SLI is somehow smaller, within 65% to 75%, but even that is a very good result. Far Cry 2 quite positively responds to the increase in the number of GPUs in the video system, and here the gain achieved through use of the SLI combination in high resolutions exceeds 90%! Good results were also produced in Race Driver: Grid as well, – the SLI performance amounted from 73% to almost 90%.

Now we consider the scalability of a somehow different type. Namely, we'll find out how the performance of GeForce GTX 295 will change if we install it on a motherboard with support for the PCI Express 1.0 bus whose bandwidth is twice as low as compared to the similar bus in PCI Express v2.0. To this end, we glued part of the PCI Express connector of the GeForce GTX 295 with a scotch tape to make it run in the PCI-E 2.0 8x mode.

On this screenshot, you can see that after this simple trick (we glued two images to make all the parameters of this menu item visible in NVIDIA's Control Panel) the video card uses twice as few PCI Express 2.0 bus lanes, and the overall bus bandwidth is equal to that of the PCI Express 1.0 16x.

We'll display the results of performance tests run with GeForce GTX 295 produced after "cutting down" the bus in percentage relative to those produced formerly at the speed of the PCI Express 2.0 16x bus.

As you can see from the diagram, GeForce GTX 295 almost does not respond to the two-fold reduction in the speed of the PCI Express bus. That means, on buying a GeForce GTX 295 the owners of motherboards with support for the PCI Express v1.0 bus will almost not lose at performance. Of course if the CPU is capable of fully revealing the capability of this powerful video cards.

Power consumption tests

Finally, we bring in the data on power consumed by the video cards under various load modes. In the below table, you can see the results on the power consumption for GeForce GTX 295 and Radeon HD4870X2

As you can see, in the "idle" mode the new product stands out with its quite moderate power consumption, which was favored by the reduction of the GPU frequency to 300 MHz and the video memory frequency to 100 MHz. But the major purpose of a gaming video card is to please its owners by high FPS at the maximum graphic settings. As it turned out, the appetites of GeForce GTX 295 proved to be quite moderate, especially as compared to Radeon HD4870X2. However, the mode of maximum load generated by the FurMar test in the Xtreme burning mode, showed a truly hot passion of GeForce GTX 295 whose power consumption closely approached 300W. We note that the GPU temperature in this mode reached the level of 93 and 96 C (the "master" GPU heats a bit more immensely). At the same time, the cooler of GeForce GTX 295 was overclocked to 3400 RPM, which amounts to 80% of the maximum. Needless to say, at this speed the noise from the cooler was quite immense. At the same time, while running tests in the Far Cry 2 the rotational speed of the cooler did not exceed 2400 RPM, and the noise was hardly audible.

To be able to estimate the requirements to the power rating of the PSU, we bring in the overall indicators of the power consumption of our test bench based on the CPU Core i7 965 Extreme overclocked to 3.84 GHz.

As you can see, the minimum requirements shown on the package of Zotac GeForce GTX 295 are not so distant from reality. Anyway, it is well know that it's better not to save on a PSU for top-end configurations – otherwise you're in for more expenses.

Final Words

The struggle for the "crown" of the fastest 3D accelerator is going on! Today, we have explored another "dual-headed NVIDIA's video card which can be rightfully regarded as the fastest graphic accelerator to date. The new product has demonstrated superb performance results in the most demanding modes and doesn's stand out with the "hottest" behavior or noise (unless it is intentionally heated up). Moreover, the new product allows its use in the Quad-SLI mode, so we can expect even higher FPS and 3DMark score points. But that will be a story we'll be telling next time.