Some special sauce
Some special sauce - PhysXWe already know that GeForce GTX 295 will be fast because two GTX 260 (216-core) cards in SLI run rather well at 1,920x1,200 and 2,560x1,600, but NVIDIA is extending the usefulness of the card by meting out PhysX support in a pretty cool manner.
Should a game support PhysX, then one of the GTX 295's GPUs can be set to handle the entire computationally-expensive workload on its own, leaving the other for run-of-the-mill rendering. Or, if you prefer, both GPUs can render and run PhysX. We'll have to see it in action before making judgment calls about which method is better.
Extending this farther, drivers will allow you to mix-and-match CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPUs for PhysX, meaning that a GeForce 9800 GT could be used for PhysX offload and, say, the GTX 295 for rendering.
Summary
Released next month with volume availability at the end of January 2009, NVIDIA's targeting an etail price of $499 (£350-£400) for the dual-GPU monster that looks as if it will take back the performance crown from ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2.
The mix-and-match architecture takes most of GeForce GTX 260 GPU, shrinks it down to 55nm for energy-efficiency reasons, includes some clock-for-clock performance tweaks, and adds in an extra processing block - 24 SPs - to the top-end of the architecture. A second, identical GPU is added and the two connected together for some SLI action.
Just to tease you some more, there's another GPU that's going to be released in January, to do battle with the Radeon HD 4850 X2. It's not a GeForce GTX 280, by the way, so can you guess what it is? I've purposely expunged the reference on the above picture.
Answers in the forums, please!
