Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295 retakes the title of the fastest graphics card in the world, but it doesn't do it in the emphatic fashion that many were hoping for. We didn't expect Nvidia to leave the Radeon HD 4870 X2 for dead and it hasn't done that, but what it has done is deliver higher performance in most titles. There are, of course, titles where performance between the two is very close, but the big swings go in Nvidia's favour.

There are still some issues with the Quad SLI drivers to iron out, and what we've learned today is that, for the most part, there is no need for more than two GPUs to play / /any of today's games at decent resolutions. The return on investment diminishes quite spectacularly when you go beyond a couple of GPUs because today's games just aren't intensive enough for there to be clear advantages, but it's nevertheless impressive to see a game maxed out at 2,560 x 1,600 running into the engine's frame rate cap.

Ultimately, it's going to come down to pricing if there is a gulf between the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and GeForce GTX 295, the Radeon gets our nod, but if Nvidia's partners manage to hit the prices we're being quoted, we'd get the GTX 295 because of its inherent performance advantage in all but a few scenarios.