NVIDIA regains performance crown with GeForce GTX 295

NVIDIA rolled out the GeForce GTX 295 today and you can find dozens of reviews on the web to discover how the new dual-GPU beast performs. Lets take a quick look.
Bit Tech reports the new NVIDIA card can be considered the fastest graphics card on the planet as of today, but the title isn't entirely undisputed. The GeForce GTX 295 doesn't leave the Radeon HD 4870 X2 for dead but does provide higher performance in most titles.

When AMD launched the Radeon HD 4870 X2, it was pretty much an undisputed champion with only one game showing the GeForce GTX 280 as a match for AMD’s dual-GPU behemoth. With the GeForce GTX 295, we were never going to see those kinds of performance advances – but then neither did we expect them – because the GTX 295 is about redressing the balance. It’s two GPUs vs. two GPUs again, skin on skin, in a fight to the death and, frankly speaking, Nvidia wins that battle by a nose.

It’s significantly faster in a number of titles and there are only a few scenarios where the GeForce GTX 295 is slower – only one of those is what we would call a battering and that’s in Fallout 3 at 2,560 x 1,600. That is, of course, down to the fact that the GT200b GPUs become bandwidth starved at high resolutions with high anti-aliasing enabled.

Interestingly, the GeForce GTX 295 uses a lot less power than ATI's Radeon HD 4800 cards. In idle the GeForce GTX 295 uses 12W less than a Radeon HD 4870 and 27W less than a Radeon HD 4870 X2. In typical load the difference is even bigger, the GeForce GTX 295 uses 38W less than the Radeon HD 4870 X2.

Another review can be read at PC Perspective, they conclude NVIDIA is back on top of the graphics world:

The single card performance (though dual GPU of course) of the BFG GeForce GTX 295 1796MB solution was impressive and the new card easily takes the top spot as the best performing single slot graphics card available. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 has FINALLY been unseated after a full five and half months as the king of the hill. NVIDIA would have liked to have accomplished this feat earlier than this but I imagine they were forced to wait for their 55nm process move (from the 65nm that the GeForce GTX 280 and original 260 use) to fit inside the power envelope.