NVIDIA's upcoming high-end graphics card, the GeForce GTX 295 has been put through its first round of publicly-revealed benchmarks, comparing it against ATI's HD 4870 X2 card. The GTX 295 is a dual-gpu card, using two of NVIDIA's GT200 processors. The card will contain almost 1.8GB of DDR3 memory, nearly as much as many full computers are equipped with. In order to run all that hardware, the GTX 295 will draw a staggering 289 watts of power, so a power supply upgrade may be in store for you if you're planning on picking up the card once it's available.

The performance ratings show a marked, if not consistent level of improvement over the ATI HD 4870 X2. The GTX 295 pulled a five-to-twenty frames per second improvement in games like Call of Duty: World at War, Left 4 Dead, and FarCry 2. Fallout 3 showed more meager improvements, but the big winner was Dead Space, which nearly doubled its frame rate when rendered on the GTX 295. Despite these performance boosts, NVIDIA's card actually drew less power than ATI's, suggesting a more efficiently-engineered design. Word is that NVIDIA will formally introduce the card a the upcoming CES, so you shouldn't have to wait long to get some more thorough benchmarks.

This story around the web: