The Dual Graphics Platform Battle, Part 1

Although both graphics vendors are thriving - ATI's Xenos powers the Microsoft Xbox360, and NVIDIA the Sony Playstation 3 - they needed to find ways of selling more graphics hardware into the PC market. Running two VGA cards for powering games and 3D applications seems to be a feasible idea - first, because 3Dfx already did this in 1998; and second, because this fits into the trend of increasing parallelism. In addition, a working chipset line is worth being pursued for the AMD platforms, because unlike Intel, the chip maker doesn't supply the vast majority of chipsets by itself.

NVIDIA was first to offer a platform for deployment of a graphics card couple. The technology is called Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and is available in a number of NVIDIA nForce4 chipsets for either AMD or Intel processors. ATI announced its Crossfire Multi Video Processing (MVP) counterattack earlier this year, but was not able to actually ship the product - until now.