Nvidia unveils fastest graphics card to date

The company's GTX 295 graphics cards has two graphics processing units (GPUs) with 240 cores each that can execute graphics and other computing tasks like video processing. The product was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The card delivers 1.788 teraflops of performance, which Nvidia claims is the fastest single graphics card in the market. It outperforms its closest competitor, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, by close to 15 percent when playing games, according to the company.

ATI was not available for comment, however official statistics listed on ATI's website clock their Radeon card at 2.4 teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second.

On top of raw performance, Nvidia also offers some unique features to make gaming more engaging.

The card supports 3D displays that are the rave at this year's Consumer Electronic Show. A special display would need to be used, and also a separate pair of glasses from Nvidia would also be required. Currently there are a number of manufacturers that support the technology, but time will tell how the technology picks up.

In addition to graphics, Nvidia's latest card can also process physics calculations, adding more realism to gaming. A bi-product of the firm's acquisition of Ageia in February, games supporting the PhysX technology can have more interactive surroundings, simulating explosions, water, and wind with more realism.

The monster of a card supports around 1.8GB of graphics memory and can be pair with another card in what the firm calls SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology, effectively doubling performance.

Outside of gaming, the massive processing power across cores could boost Nvidia's push into the GPU-based general purpose computing space.

The card can convert PCs to mini-supercomputers, scaling application performance by executing code simultaneously across many processing cores.