Date:
Thursday , January 08, 2009
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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BFGTech GeForce GTX 295

Today marks the launch of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 and BFGTech has their GeForce GTX 295 retail box ready to go. We will take a very detailed look at gameplay performance between the BFGTech GeForce GTX 295 in six games with an AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 and GeForce GTX 260 SLI. We also explore whether overclocking makes a difference.

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System Test Setup

We will be using an EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Overclocked to 3.66GHz), and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3.

While it might be a bit “overkill,” we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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New Drivers

Both NVIDIA and AMD provided us with new beta drivers that contain performance improvements that will be made public this month. From NVIDIA we have ForceWare 181.20 and from AMD we have 8.561.3.

NV

The improvements over the previous driver (180.87) used in on our GeForce GTX 295 preview include:

  • DX10 Far Cry 2 perf improvement

  • DX10 Fallout 3 Indoor scene improvement

  • Need for Speed Undercover improvement

  • Left4Dead Quad SLI improvement

  • CUDA/PhysX bug fixes (intermittent lockups in prior version)

  • HDMI bug fixes (intermittent lockups in prior version)

  • GRID BSOD fix and improved high res/high AA perf

AMD

The improvements that the new AMD 8.561.3 driver includes over Catalyst 8.12 are:

  • Call of Juarez improves up to 15% with AA enabled

  • Company of Heroes improves up to 5%

  • Crysis improves as much as 18%

  • Crysis Warhead improves as much as 20-30%

  • Need for Speed Underground improves as much as 70%-80%

  • World in Conflict improve as much as 5%

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in bar graph form with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.