Nvidia Corp. on Monday officially released the company’s first graphics card featuring two graphics processing units (GPUs). A concept of premium-class dual-chip graphics cards developed by board makers is now approved by Nvidia Corp. and will be available more broader than before.

“The GeForce 7950 GX2 is a great card for the gamer that’s looking for the absolute best performance in a single graphics card solution. With that kind of power gamers can crank up their screen resolution to an unbelievable 2560x1600 for an extreme high definition gaming experience,” said Ujesh Desai, general manager of desktop GPUs at Nvidia.

Nvidia’s GeForce 7950 GX2 is positioned as the company’s top-of-the-range graphics cards, which is more powerful than the GeForce 7900 GTX, but which is not as fast as two GeForce 7900 GTX in multi-GPU mode. The new product, which will retail for $599 - $649, carries two GeForce 7900 graphics chips with 24 pixel processors, 8 vertex shader processors as well as 512MB of memory for each GPU. Each graphics processor is clocked at 500MHz, whereas memory functions at 1200MHz. The chips operate in SLI mode – thus giving such advantages as special SLI antialiasing modes – and communicate with each other using MIO-interface.

The new graphics card can be used to build systems with four GPUs and take advantage of quad SLI technology. However, end-users will not be able to assemble such systems themselves, as Nvidia does not provide appropriate drivers to public, however, system builders will use the GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card for future ultra high-end machines.

End users seeking for the GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card should not only ensure that they have a high-quality power supply, but also a mainboard that can support the new graphics board. At press time, Nvidia’s web-site listed 22 mainboards that would definitely work with the product, however, the company supplied X-bit labs with a list of 40 mainboards validated to work with the model 7950 GX2.

According to Nvidia, the GeForce 7950 GX2 product can be purchased from virtually all of the company’s add-in-card partners starting from the 5^th of June.