NVIDIA working on top-secret dual-GPU

It’s no secret that AMD is looking to take the GPU crown with their upcoming dual-GPU, the R9 Fury X2.

With the raw compute power of two R9 Fury’s and given how well AMD’s latest GPUs scale, even NVIDIA’s mighty GTX Titan X can’t compete with the R9 Fury X2 – it’s not even close.

But if AMD thought NVIDIA was going to just lie down and let them take top spot, then AMD had better think again.

Deep in their Skunk Works, NVIDIA has secretly been tinkering away with their GM200 GPU, the chip that powers their enthusiast-grade GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti, and come to the conclusion that the best way to make a more powerful graphics card is to slap two of these bad boys together.

That’s what a select number of press were told at a discrete press event in New York at any rate.

Imagine, a single graphics card with the equivalent performance of two GTX Titan Xs. Heck, even two GTX 980 Ti’s, which are very nearly as fast as NVIDIA’s top-end monster, will do the trick.

Their scaling isn’t quite as linear as AMD’s GPUs, but they’re noticeably faster. And imagine what could be if NVIDIA has been tweaking the scaling performance of the GM200.

Graphics Card	GPU	CUDA Cores	Core / Boost Clock	TDP	Memory	Memory Bandwidth	Price
TBC	GM200 x 2	TBC	TBC	TBC	TBC	TBC	A lot
GTX Titan X	GM200	3072/192/96	1000/1089 MHz	250W	12 GB	336 GB/s	$999
GTX 980 Ti	GM200	2816/176/96	1000/1076 MHz	250W	6 GB	336 GB/s	$649
GTX 980	GM204	2048/128/64	1127/1216 MHz	165W	4 GB	224 GB/s	$499
GTX 970	GM204	1664/104/56	1051/1178 MHz	145W	3.5GB + 0.5GB	192 GB/s	$329
GTX 960	GM206	1024/64/32	1127/1178 MHz	120W	2 GB	112 GB/s	$199
GTX 950	GM206	768/48/32	1024/1188 MHz	90W	2 GB	106 GB/s	$159

*Table courtesy of WCCF Tech.

Apparently, the press lucky enough to be told about NVIDIA’s new card were even granted samples, so we expect the card to drop soon – leaked benchmarks will probably drop even sooner.

Let’s just hope that, whatever this card is called, offers a worthwhile fight for AMD – competition makes everything better.

More to the point, we’re hoping NVIDIA hasn’t made the same mistake as they did with the GTX Titan Z, the last dual-GPU they released.

Big and beastly as it may have been, it wasn’t actually the fastest card on the block, those honours go to the Radeon R9 295X2, and it was nearly twice the price.

In fact, even after a number of price cuts, you’d be lucky to find a Titan Z for under R30, 000 – no, we’re not joking.