NVIDIA to launch GTX295 January 2009

In August, ATI, now a division of AMD finally pulled its socks together and put out what was possibly their best product yet with the launch of the Radeon 4xxx series of graphics card. Not only did they outperform their similarly classed Geforce 9xxx serious counterparts, they also smashed the performance crown with the 4879×2. Subsequently, NVIDIA responded with their GTX 2xx series of products, which were big, hot, expensive, very complicated, but only marginally better than ATI’s offerings.

NVIDIA GTX295

With the GTX 295 set to launch in January, NVIDIA is releasing their flagship product, which will be the most powerful card yet in their arsenal, and the preliminary results show a marginal improvement over the leading 4870×2 from ATI.

However, some problems were identified, the major one being NVIDIA is using a lower-clocked memory speed. As a result of this unfortunate decision, the GTX 295 tanks at very high resolutions and Anti-Aliasing, which are known to be memory hungry performance demands. If the limiting memory barrier isn’t encountered, it edges over the 4870×2 slightly.

Graphic card

Hopefully though, aftermarket manufacturers have been known to deviate far from NVIDIA’s reference designs and specs. Some enterprising manufacturers will hopefully resolve this problem by putting in better memory chips that can be clocked higher than 2,300MHz. If so, the GTX 295 will rid itself of the memory problems and perform more consistently across all resolutions.

NVIDIA also promises to launch the product below the MSRP of the 4870×2, which at this date is about $500. I am skeptical to this claim, but let’s see if they can deliver this promise.