i know in the vantage scores the 295 gtx wins by a little bit, but in most games the 480 takes the cake.

Answering yourself, or shooting for a particular post count?...
 
 
edit -
 
L2I, you type too quickly. Aaargh!

Mutt Slayer

I went from quad sli 295's to Sli 480's. I like to bench when I get the itch but I game a lot more.

Having said that, I'm very happy with the gameplay, smoothness and DirectX 11 with the 480's. If someone offered me a refund plus $50, I wouldn't go back. So far so good.

That speaks volumes...

Quad SLI and Crossfire suck, stay away from Quad SLI, you get little return on the third GPU nevermind the fourth plus you have to deal with input lag, microstutter, driver support (What i mean by that is that the drivers need to be top notch or your gaming experience will suffer and Nvidia/ATi are not always on top of their drivers, its hard work to keep 4 GPU's running in synch).

From now on i will stick to SLI or at the very most Tri SLI, never again will i buy a dual GPU card nevermind 2.

The drivers for the 400 Series are still not 100% bug free and the cards have not reached their max performance due to the drivers.

To answer your question as of 5/3/2010 YES a single FTW stock will outperform a stock GTX 295 in everthing except maybe heavy particle calculation. The GTX 295 has the advantage because of the dual GPU but the GTX 480 comes close due to the shader and clock speeds. Hope it helps!

Moltenlava

Quad SLI and Crossfire suck, stay away from Quad SLI, you get little return on the third GPU nevermind the fourth plus you have to deal with input lag, microstutter, driver support (What i mean by that is that the drivers need to be top notch or your gaming experience will suffer and Nvidia/ATi are not always on top of their drivers, its hard work to keep 4 GPU's running in synch).

From now on i will stick to SLI or at the very most Tri SLI, never again will i buy a dual GPU card nevermind 2.

I had micro stutter in two way SLI.  I'm just getting the best single chip video card that is available from now on, and right now that is the GTX 480.  The GTX 295 offers higher scores in 3DMark Vantage, but the GTX 480 offers better gaming performance, better minimum FPS, better AA performance, and it uses slightly less power.

A user here posted tri-SLI GTX 480 benchmarks and his minimum FPS in Crysis Warhead was 55 FPS, maxed out at 1920 x 1080 but with no AA.  That's pretty amazing, obviously there was no micro stutter in that test.  I forgot who posted it, but I bookmarked the image.  

Moltenlava

DMIINC

Moltenlava

Quad SLI and Crossfire suck, stay away from Quad SLI, you get little return on the third GPU nevermind the fourth plus you have to deal with input lag, microstutter, driver support (What i mean by that is that the drivers need to be top notch or your gaming experience will suffer and Nvidia/ATi are not always on top of their drivers, its hard work to keep 4 GPU's running in synch).

From now on i will stick to SLI or at the very most Tri SLI, never again will i buy a dual GPU card nevermind 2.

+1 Molten

However it was fun running those quad SLI setups with new D0 stepping 920's on E759 last year. Even more fun was having those long threads about optimizing performance and getting your rig to run Vantage over 40K. I had fun. But for day to day performance Single or at most SLI setup is all I see for me in future.

yeah for benchmarks they are fine, the quality of whats being outputted on screen is not important just the numbers the benchmark spews out at the end but for gaming the quality is just as important as what the FPS counter is reading if not more so.

++1 Agreed.
 
I need to play more games but I think the quality is superior. I loved hitting 40K on vantage when it was a rarity. But I hated looking over at my sons screen with a single GTX285 and thinking his game played much smoother than my quad 295's. Benchmarks don't equal smooth gameplay.