Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

Testing the new Nvidia monsters

Posted by Jon Peddie and Robert Dow on February 4th 2009 | Comments Closed
Categories: Hardware Review
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Figure 1: Comparison of five leading graphics AIBs at 1920 x 1200. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Figure 2: Comparison of five leading graphics AIBs at 2560 x 1600. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Figure 3: Call of Duty at War played on two AIBs. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

When ATI’s half-sized half-price HD Radeon 4870 opened up a can of whoopass on Nvidia’s GTX 280, a lot of folks in the industry where all too willing write Nvidia’s epitaph. Fools. I’ve said it publicly and I’ll say it here: I’d never underestimate Jen Hsun Huang, he’ll always manage to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

So, here we are four months later and who’s at the top of the pile in performance? Oh, it’s Nvidia—gee, I guess they aren’t dead after all.

In our last edition of MTTL, we reported Nvidia breaking the Vantage 20K barrier with the GTX 295. Since then, Nvidia launched their GTX 285. The 285 is essentially a refresh of the GTX 280 with a die shrink by going to 55nm and subsequent reduced power
requirements.

Neither the GTX 285 or GTX 295 support Nvidia’s heralded Hybrid SLI, which is of some interest to those of us who would like to save a little power when doing spreadsheets and not playing games. However, the company has plans for new desktop chipsets. Hybrid SLI still has an important place in the company’s strategy, not least of which is in notebooks, where it’s a key element of the company’s value proposition. For the 285 and 295, Nvidia focused on idle power, which is very low compared to the competition and even their previous generation.

So as great as the 295 is, the 285 is about the same in Vantage as the 280. But, the 280 runs with slower clocks and, therefore, cooler.

The comparison of the main features and price is shown in Table 1.

At higher resolutions, the relationships in performance pretty much stay the same. The GTX 295 is not configured to run in triple SLI, which would be six GPUs. We expect that the roll off on performance would kill any cost
effectiveness.

We only received one GTX 285, so we weren’t able to run the AIB in SLI mode, but we suspect it will behave similarly to the GTX 280, offering about a 70% gain in performance with AA on and 75% with AA off.

Game tests

We did a simple game test, using the opening scene in Call of Duty and compared the 285 to its big brother the 295.The results were predictable, but interesting nonetheless.

What do we think?

Whereas the 295 was a killer, the 285 is just a cost reduction, and power reduction spin on the original 280—welcome, but not earth shattering.