Nvidia today announced world's first hybrid technology for PC platforms: the Hybrid SLI. The new technology tries to answer two of the most important issues in modern graphics processing - maximizing the efficiency while keeping the power consumption at a low level.

The company plans to integrate its new achievements into a wide variety of graphics and motherboard desktop and notebook products scheduled to be deployed during this year with the upcoming Intel and AMD platforms.

"From the introduction of programmable GPUs to the rapid adoption of our multi-GPU SLI technology, NVIDIA has repeatedly pioneered and innovated to solve difficult problems for the industry. We believe Hybrid SLI technology is one of the most important innovations we've come up with to date," said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA. "Hybrid SLI delivers new multi-GPU technology to a large segment of the PC market, delivering consumers a level of PC graphics performance and power efficiency never before seen."

The new technology has been detailed upon back in June 2007, and is based on the GeForce graphics processor unit and SLI multi-GPU technology. The Hybrid SLI technology combines the GPUs on the motherboard (mGPUs) with discrete NVidia GPUs (dGPUs), if they are present on the same PC platform. This allows a computer to work at full speed when performing hardcore computing tasks then switch back to an "Efficiency" mode when intensive processing is not required anymore.

Hybrid SLI is comprised of two new Nvidia technologies: GeForce Boost and HybridPower. The latter is useful when the computer is performing average day-to-day tasks, such as multimedia rendering or Internet browsing. Although the saved energy is not so important in a desktop PC environment, this aspect becomes critical when it comes to mobile platforms.

Hybrid SLI is Nvidia's response to AMD's Power Xpress hybrid graphics technology. The CPU manufacturer announced that their next mobile platform (called Puma) will include the Power Xpress technology that automatically switches between discrete and integrated GPUs.