What is the ROG MARS?
Faster than GTX 295?NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB currently occupies the position of world's fastest graphics card. It can be thought of as two GeForce GTX 260s coupled together, via internal SLI, and presented as one card. Performance is a little better than that, though, thanks to the use of a faster front-end, equipped with 240 stream processors per GPU, rather than 216 on regular cards.
In an effort to reduce costs, NVIDIA and its partners have released single-PCB GTX 295 cards that,right now, etail from £330 or so.
The ASUS ROG MARS ups the ante by housing two faster underlying GPUs, GTX 285s, and coupling them up in the same way. What's more, to keep the card as outlandish as possible, each GPU is aligned with 2GB of on-board memory - double that of a normal card. That's a total of 4GB of on-board memory with a combined 1,024-bit interface. Let's put the two together in a brief table.
| Card | ASUS ROG MARS | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 |
|---|---|---|
| Stream processors | 480 | 480 |
| Engine clock (MHz) |
648 |
576 |
| Texture fillrate (GT/s) | 103.68 | 92.16 |
| Shader clock (MHz) | 1,476 | 1,242 |
| Compute power (GFLOPs) | 2,125 |
1,788 |
| Memory clock (MHz) | 2,304 |
1,998 |
| Memory size (MBs) | 4,096 |
1,792 |
| Memory interface (bits) | 1,024 |
896 |
| Memory bandwidth (GB/s) | 294.9 |
223.8 |
| Price (£) | £1,030?? |
330 |
No matter which way you cut it, the ROG MARS is faster than the GTX 295. Texture fillrate is 12.5 per cent higher; computer power is 18.5 per cent greater, and memory-bandwidth is increased by almost 32 per cent. We'll get to the price once we've caught our breath.
