Rumours About New Dual-Chip Flagship Graphics Card from Nvidia Resurrect

From X-bit Labs: Nvidia Corp. reportedly plans to release a new dual-chip flagship graphics card next month in a bid to compete against AMD Radeon HD 6990, the forthcoming flagship from the arch-rival. The novelty will, apparently, be based on the top-of-the-range code-named GF110 graphics processing unit (GPU).

Little is known about the graphics card that is said to be called GeForce GTX 590. The board is presumably set to be based on two GF110 graphics chips and will therefore have 1024 stream processing units, 128 texture units and 96 raster operation units in total. In order to simplify the design of the board, the GF110 chips will rely on two 384-bit memory buses to connect to 3072MB of GDDR5 memory (each chip will have 1536MB frame-buffer).

Several web-sites have already published images of the yet unreleased dual-GPU graphics boards powered by Nvidia's graphics processors, but it is not completely clear whether the solutions are actually set to be released by all Nvidia's partners or just by some of them. It is also uncertain whether the cards will be launched at all; back in the past several makers demonstrated dual-chip prototypes, but did not release them commercially afterwards.

Based on images published on NordicHardware and TechConnect web-sites, the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590 will have two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors, thus, will consume between 300W and 375W.

Given the fact that Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics card is significantly faster ATI Radeon HD 6870, the dual-chip GeForce GTX 590 will have all chances to outperform the Radeon HD 6990 code-named Antilles. Although the flagship graphics cards do not represent a substantial share of AMD's or Nvidia's revenues, they attract attention to the "GeForce" and "Radeon" brands and therefore advertize mainstream products and prove technological leadership of their developers.

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