The head of Nvidia Corp., a leading supplier of graphics adapters, told financial analysts that the recently released ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card was not the highest-performing offering on the market and that Nvidia does believe that single-chip graphics cards are still the best for high-end graphics market. Still, in the light of the incoming Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 the company indicated that dual-chip solutions may very well exist.

ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, recently released its ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card with two graphics processing units (GPUs) on it. The product, which costs $449 and is not larger or more power hungry compared to other high-end solutions like ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT or Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra, promises to challenge the GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra in terms of performance.

“If you want to put two GPUs on an add-in card and you deliver the absolute highest performance in the world, the enthusiast that uses that particular PC will certainly tolerate the fact that it’s a much larger solution. But if it’s not the highest performance solution in the world, as in the case of the X2, then it’s just really problematic. You know, there’s no market really for a product that’s larger, louder, and not as high performance. So, I think that GeForce 8800 GTX is still absolutely the best DX10 and highest graphics performance GPU in the world,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, the president and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp.

According to performance measurements by X-bit labs, the X2 card is faster than its rivals in certain benchmarks, offers similar performance in some other and is slower whenever ATI Catalyst driver fails to enable the second graphics chip on the board. While the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 board does not feature the absolute highest 3D performance in the world, the same cannot be said about its rivals – Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, Ultra or GTS 512.

According to unofficial information, Nvidia Corp. plans to release a dual-chip Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card sometime in Q1. The reason, in the light of the fact that Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX is still the best, to release a dual-GPU product is not completely understandable. But Nvidia makes itself clear by saying that it would create a multi-chip graphics solution if it offers unbeatable performance.

“We would do an [ATI Radeon HD 3870] X2-like product only if it delivers performance that is simply not possible anywhere with a single GPU. But there’s no question that a single GPU is a better approach. […] So you know my preference and you know we have a lot of evidence and certainly know for sure that a single GPU is the best approach, but if a double GPU can deliver the highest performance on the planet, it would be accepted,” Mr. Huang explained.

Back in 2006 Nvidia released its GeForce 7950 GX2 product with two GPUs onboard that could not beat single-chip ATI Radeon 1900 XTX and Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX graphics cards in all benchmarks, but still offered considerably higher performance in certain games.

All multi-GPU solutions, whether they are 2-way, 3-way or 4-way ATI CrossFire or Nvidia SLI rely on drivers and optimizations. In case the drivers do not contain tweaks that allow every particular 3D application to take advantage of certain particular multi-GPU configuration, the software will still use one GPU and perform accordingly. There is no news that one fast GPU delivers more consistent user experience compared to any multi-GPU, but there are many cases when a graphics sub-system featuring many graphics chips provides unbeatable performance.