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NVIDIA GTX 295 Brings the Pain and Performance
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."
Just in time for holiday shopping!
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
this is like the razor wars (double blade! triple blade! quad blade! pento blade!). With OpenCL and DirectGPU (or whatever MS is calling it this week), this should be good for anyone trying to build a cheap superGPU cluster.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I might consider upgrading from my 2MB VGA after seeing it in action... :)
Have you tried GTA4? I get a nice 3fps with a Crysis killing machine. I think I'll need two of these in SLI.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
I'm glad that people are out there buying graphics cards that can render the latest games in QuadHD resolution at 120 frames per second... it makes the integrated graphics in eee class PCs that much better when the tech trickles down 5 years later.
As a somewhat mystified recent purchaser of a GTK 260 from eVGA, I was amazed to discover that NVIDIA has such problems with their linux drivers. I owned one of their older cards before and built a new computer and thought it was a no-brainer to pick NVIDIA for linux (freedom issues are notwithstanding, but I decided to go with the pragmatic choice). Only after I ran afoul of the powermizer slow switching crap, or other weird issues such as the misreporting of the screen refresh frequency, did I start digging and realized how many problems there are. As it is, I've got the beta 180.16 driver installed and it's better but I still had to do some tricks to shut off the powermizer feature. Just this morning had some other weird problem with screen corruption that's never happened before with my old hardware but more or less the same software on top of it.
For me personally, I could care less if the card hardware is great if the drivers suck. NVIDIA, fix your linux drivers please. Next time I'll give a much harder look at amd.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
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.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
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how do you people buying this stuff get over the noise of the fans? and how often do you have to exchange the fans? i buy only hardware with speed-to-noise ratio near infinity.
Easy--they're deaf. After years of working on building (near) silent PCs, I've learned that what many people/reviewers consider to be 'quiet' is nowhere near my definition of 'quiet'. I'm not quite sure how loud some gamers have their sound systems turned up, or if they play with the window open or what, but I simply can't trust a review on newegg or most websites when someone says a piece of equipment is 'silent'. There are a few websites like silentpcreview.com that do a good job, but if a piece of equipment isn't reviewed there or in the forums, you're SOL (or you get to be the guinea pig).
This guy's the limit!
GTA4 kills proc and not GPU so much - I have a GTX260 Core 216 and a Quad-core Q9550, and I get an easy 40 FPS with medium textures enabled. I hear it's supposed to go higher when Nvidia releases their new drivers. In any case, Steam Forums was having a shootout in many threads when GTA4 was released and there's a pretty clear correlation between processor power and higher framerates. It's also supposed to be 64-bit optimized so I might be getting a boost from running 64-bit Vista.
If I have not seen as far as others, it was because giants were standing on my shoulders. --Hal Abelson
All I know is that my graphics box (I call it a graphical) houses a nice little motherboard with a cute Intel chip, some hard drives, and I think I even have a sound card plugged into it.
I remember when the graphics "card" was simply part of the computer -- these days, all the other components are part of my graphical.
GTA4 is processor dependent, not GPU dependent, cos it's the crappiest console port we've seen in years.
NVIDIA, fix your linux drivers please.
NVIDIA, open your linux drivers please.
factor 966971: 966971
I wonder if this card will suffer from microstutter. The 9800GX2 benchmarked very well but real world performance was lacking because the card essentially varied between very high fps and very low fps, so it still lagged even though it got decent average fps.
With these dual cards it's best to look at their low fps rating. An average fps is often misleading.
You get 25fps in GTA4 and 40fps in Crysis
:D
Now, which one (given those numbers) would you expect to look better?
Which one actually looks (a lot) better?
Theres your problem.
Also it has a spectacular memory leak that sees it using up all available physical memory after a while, grinding to a halt and refusing to load any new textures, which is actually pretty funny the first time. Driving around in a flying car avoiding invisible buildings
See this is where you are uninformed, the new GTX's have lower power consumption than the 9000 series at idle and for 2d applications.
A while back, AMDTi said that they were not competing at the high-end anymore: "There were also very specific admissions that AMD/ ATI isnâ(TM)t competing at the high end with Nvidia, nor do they intend to match up to the GTX 280 with a release of their own uber-chip." source. So to say "ATI had to combine two cards to be on top!" kind of completely misses the point. (emphasis added.)
For the interested, there's a great article at anandtech talking about how the R770 came to be pretty awesome... Really, though, it's not a super-high-end part.
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.
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
Please cite that.
I'm running L4D on my (very) old computer, a 1.6 Ghz AMD single core with a 7600 GS and 1.5GB ram. The game runs fine at medium settings (despite the fact that I am way, way under the minimum system requirements), and when I briefly swapped out the 7600 for a 7900, I was able to turn a few of the settings from medium to high (1024x768, textures low, medium effects -> 1280x1024, textures medium, high effects) and still get a stable 20-25 average frame rate.
Not quality benchmarks, I know, but the engine hasn't changed drastically since HL2 except for graphical improvements (=GPU limited), so claims about it being CPU limited haven't been true since the first public version of the Source engine, and that's assuming they were even true back in 2004.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
People need to understand that sometimes, those detail sliders aren't meant to be cranked all the way up on current hardware. They're there to "future-proof" the game, so that it can still look pretty 2 or 5 years down the road. Wing Commander 4 did it for example.
Of course, it's not a huge incentive for developers to future-proof a game when all they get for it is a forum-bashing like "omg the game sux i can't get 50 fps on my 1337 rig".
Don't whistle while you're pissing.