NEW: Gigabyte creates dual-GPU graphics card

Gigabyte will announce Friday a graphics card running two graphics processors on one board. According to sources, the SLI card will lift current 3DMark2003 record levels by a significant margin while being priced lower than ATI's and Nvidia's single-GPU high-end cards.

If two graphics cards in one system are too expensive or simply not fast enough, Gigabyte's new 3D1 board may be worth a serious look. Sources told Tom's Hardware Guide, that the company prepares to launch a dual-GPU card Friday, saying that it will "revise the VGA performance ranking".

The card integrates two Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT graphics processors and is the first 6600 GT card on the market to offer a total of 256 MByte DDR 3 memory and 256 Mbit of memory bandwidth, according to the manufacturer. The card is cooled by two on-board fans.

Full story: Tom's Hardware

An alternative to SLI technology I suppose.
Z

damnit, it's pci express and i don't want to upgrade my computer yet

Didnt ATI have a card like this a while back? I remember that card not doing so well. Maybe now the technology is better, but we shall have to wait and see.

I know you can get an ATI chipset card that has 2 chipsets for quad monitor support which works quite well.

ATI had the idea for dual gpu, but went with the SLI idea instead.

OK I found the info of what I spoke of. The card I remembered was the Rage Fury Maxx. It had 2 ATI RAGE 128 PRO chips on it. I dont remember it being to successful.

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Originally Posted by Jediab

OK I found the info of what I spoke of. The card I remembered was the Rage Fury Maxx. It had 2 ATI RAGE 128 PRO chips on it. I dont remember it being to successful.

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The RAGE FURY MAXX had driver issues. The Rage Fury MAXX performed AFR (alternate frame rendering) which is similar to what nvidia and ATI are doing now with SLI (scalable link interface). If you remember, 3dfx use to use SLI (scan line interleave) on the voodoo 5 5500 which meant each GPU rendered alternate scanlines, not frames.

Before the V5 5500, 3dfx had SLI with the V2 1000 PCI video accelerator card (earlier called Black Magic). SLI was achieved using 2 V2 1000s in one system. With the V2 1000 you would need to hook the two V2s together using something similar as the new bridge nvidia has out now, but the V2s had a ribbon cable bridging the two cards together. Using three video cards in one system created alot of heat, plus you needed to use a VGA jumper cable to go from the regular video card, (the one you wanted to accelerate) to the first of the V2s, then the bridge ribbon cable would go from V2(1) to V2(2) then the monitor would plug into V2(2). Back in the day they were blazin'.

I remember the Voodoo2, I had the Banshee(bit better than Voodoo2) but my cuz got the V2 SLI.

I have a pair of Banshee's if any one wan'ts.

Remember trying to get it to run 3 (4 vid cards total) were tring for one for each axis. I think it worked... or did it just melt the 3rd one down...

back in the day.