Nvidia CEO Criticizes the Dual-GPU Graphics Cards

Jen-Hsun Huang, the president and chief executive officer of Nvidia told financial analysts that AMD's Radeon HD 3870 X2 cannot be the highest-performing offering on the graphics market. Moreover, Huang criticized the very idea of joining two graphics processing cores on a single card. Nvidia seems to believe that the classical, single-chip approach pays off best when it comes to high-end graphics products.

The statement is somewhat unexpected, given the fact that Nvidia has long been touting its upcoming dual-GPU chip offering, the GeForce 9800 X2 graphics card. However, Huang claimed that these dual-chip cards may exist, but not at the professional level.

Advanced Micro Devices' graphics division has released in late January its dual-graphics processing core solution, the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2. The graphics card is alleged to be the most powerful graphics card in the world, with a computing capacity of more than 1 TeraFLOPS. The graphics card is already on the market and sells for $499.

"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.

The existing benchmarks show that AMD's dual-GPU solution is faster than its rivals in some situations, but sometimes, the card fails in performance when the ATI driver fails to engage the second GPU in processing. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 board might not be the highest offering when it comes to 3D graphics performance, but Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX, Ultra or GTS 512 get closer to perfection.

However, given the fact that Nvidia already has some hardcore graphics card offerings, the reason for releasing a dual-GPU solution is pretty unclear. However, Nvidia said that it would only offer a dual-graphics core card only if it offers the highest 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," Huang explained.