Nvidia Releases Geforce GTX295, Boosts CUDA Platform

Nvidia has released a new dual GPU card called the GTX 295 and based on the GT260 core and is expected to go head to head against ATI's 4870x2 graphic cards which have already flooded the market.

Details released show that the card's GPU falls between a dual GTX280 and a GTX260; it has the same number of stream processors as two GTX280 (480) but runs at GTX260 stock speeds.

The card is expected to retail for around £322 and opens the tantalising prospects of having two cards in SLI mode and 960 stream processors running concurrently.

The company has also announced that it is partnering with Berkeley’s Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), one of the leading distributed computing platforms in the world, to tap the power of CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), Nvidia's proprietary programming platform to massively accelerate the processing of data collected through SETI@home.

Nvidia reckons that CUDA could help cut the time it takes to crunch data by a factor of eight using the Geforce GTX280 GPU-based card (compared to an Intel Core 2 Duo E8200). A computer with two GTX 295 cards should be able to perform at least 25 times faster than the aforementioned CPU.

Earlier this month, Nvidia unveiled Tesla, its high performance super computer platform based on the GTX280 has 250x more computing power than the average computer and should cost around £4000.

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