Time has come for the long-awaited announcement of the dual-GPU card NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2, which unites the power of two G92 GPUs into a single solution. Unlike AMD with its multi-GPU CrossFire solutions for the top price range, NVIDIA does not seem to give up the single-GPU future for its graphics cards. The company still plans to manufacture fast single-GPU solutions. But the card we are going to review today should outperform AMD RADEON HD 3870 X2, which was the fastest card since this January.

NVIDIA possesses much experience in designing and manufacturing multi-GPU cards. The company had offered SLI much earlier than AMD came up with its CrossFire. Besides, NVIDIA already offered a modern dual-GPU solution GeForce 7950 GX2. This card was based on two G71 operating at reduced frequencies in SLI mode. And now the company has announced another card based on two G92 GPUs. We'll review it today. The time of dual-GPU solutions has come again (after Quantum3D Obsidian, ATI Rage Fury MAXX, GeForce 7950 GX2).

I repeat that passion for multi-GPU products is bad news. Even though it's convenient to design products for various price ranges using different numbers of identical GPUs, single-GPU solutions will always have advantages: they will be faster in all applications, not only in optimized for multi-GPU configurations. Besides, they do not contain excessive units in each GPU, they offer better power consumption and heat release characteristics. Single-GPU solutions don't have problems with latencies in drawing frames, typical of Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR).

Manufacturers regard multi-GPU configurations as one of the simplest ways to increase performance, noticeable in benchmarks in the first place. Efficiency of SLI/CF technologies in benchmarks reaches 80-90%, this performance gain is demonstrated only in high resolutions and only in some benchmarks. In our opinion, such products should be launched only for temporal reinforcement of positions in the market until the rollout of the next GPU generation. They should not replace single-GPU High-End graphics cards.

The theoretical part about GeForce 9800 GX2 will be very short. This card is just based on two G92 GPUs installed on two connected PCBs with memory and other components. The dual-GPU system works in SLI mode implemented on the hardware level. PCI Express lanes and the corresponding bridge are embedded into the PCB, so the card does not take these resources from the motherboard. The only difference of this solution from the system of two GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards is their GPU and memory frequencies.

You can read the entire article at Digit-Life.