Water Block for GTX 295

[Durkadurka]

You'd want to pick something else than 8xAA... I'll explain why.

nVIDIA's GT200 and GT200b as well as the previous G80/G92 cards come equipped with what seems (at first glance) like being an Impressive set of TMUs. The kick is that when performing Anisotropic Filtering or Floating Points Texturing (such as HDR) your TMUs are halved (so 80 TMUs in the GTX 280 turns to 40).

The same can be said with the RBE (Render Back End or ROPs). The GT200 and GT200b come with far more ROPs than ATi's RV770 BUT when doing 8xAA (REAL 8xAA not the fake CSAA which only uses 4 samples and which Crysis and many games default on nVIDIA hardware therefore creating an apples and oranges scenario when comparing to ATi which does REAL 8xAA you can verify this by opening up the Crysis config file and right there you'll see that the nVIDIA 8xAA setting takes 4 samples and is called CSAA whereas ATi settings detect at 8 samples for full RGMS AA) the GT200 and GT200b lose HORRIBLY. Try it yourself. Set your nVIDIA AA in the control panel to 8x and set it to override application settings... watch the slide show.. ATi users now you try it and watch the nice fluid pixels.

I used to be a big time nVIDIA supporter until I uncovered that most of their performance comes from driver tricks rather than real hardware goodness. Too bad for ATi though, their drivers just aren't up to par.

Now add what sniipe was talking about (due to the frame buffer size being 1GB vs. 896MB) high res gaming is just better on 4870 X2 and is about to get even sweeter with the Catalyst 9.1 drivers.

How is this even remotely relevant for a discussion about waterblocks for the 295 ?