Nvidia finally announced the h

The graphics card is based on two shrinked vesions of the company's GT200 GPUs (GT200b), manufactured using the 55nm process, matching the AMD's Radeon HD 4000-series GPUs.

The GTX 295's GPUs will run at a core clock of 576MHz, with shaders clocked at 1242MHz. Like today's GeForce GTX 260, each GPU will have seven active ROP partitions and a 448-bit path to 896MB of memory. That memory will be of the GDDR3 variety, running at 1000MHz (or 2000 MT/s). Unlike the GTX 260, though, the GTX 295's individual GPUs will have all ten of their thread processor clusters intact, for a total of 240 stream processors per chip.



The GeForce GTX 295 will consume 289W of electric power (six and eight pin PSU required) and it will be equipped with two DVI-I and one HDMI ports. It will also support dual-card configurations, for quad SLI, or one of its GPUs can be reassigned to handle PhysX calculations rather than graphics.

According to the specifications of the card, it should be highly competitive to Radeon HD 4870 X2 dual-GPU proposal, at least in terms of memory bandwidth and texture filtering capacities. But still, we have to wait until we actually have the card in our hands and run some benchmarks. The GeForce GTX 295 will debuts at the CES show in Las Vegas in January, and Nvidia seems to rush into the announcement of the card in an effort to slow AMD's momentum during the holiday season.

	GeForce GTX 295	GeForce GTX 280	GeForce 9800 GX2	AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2
GPU	GT200b	GT200	G92
Manufacturing process	55nm	65nm	65nm	55nm
SP	480(240×2)	240	256(128×2)	1600 (800x2)
GPU frequency	576MHz	902MHz	600MHz	750 MHz
SP clock	1,242MHz	1,296MHz	1,500MHz
Memory	GDDR3 1,792MB(896MB×2)	GDDR3 1GB	GDDR3 1GB(512MB×2)	GDDR5 2GB (1GB×2)
Memory frequency	1,998MHz (999MHz DDR)	2,214MHz	2,000MHz (1,000MHz DDR)	900 MHz
Memory interface	448bit per GPU	512bit	256bit per GPU	256bit per GPU
Texturing units	160 (80×2)	80	128(64×2)	128 (64×2)
ROPs	56(28×2)	32	32(16×2)	32(16×2)
Power consumption	289W	236W	197W	286W