High-end gaming still is niche-market, but growing demand prompts card manufacturers to extract additional performance from existing architectures. Gigabyte has been offering dual-GPU cards for almost half a year, but limited these cards mainly to entry-level and mainstream GeForce 6600 GPUs.

Several manufacturers, including Asus, MSI and also Gigabyte, are showing at this year's Computex dual-GPU cards based on Nvidia's high-end GeForce 6800 Ultra. All three cards integrate 512 MByte GDDR3 memory for each GPU - resulting in a whopping 1 GByte of available graphics memory.

Of course, such cards do not come cheap. The devices are only through special order only and will be priced in the region between $800 and $900. Power consumption also reaches a new record level for graphics boards: Minimum idle power is posted at 230 watts. The companies did not say how much power their cards will consume under full load. (THG)