Asus Creates 3-GPU Monster Card
Asus has managed to create a technological Frankenstein by jamming three GPUs into a single card. It’s three times the graphical processing power, but at what cost? Taken literally, the answer’s none because Asus isn’t planning to sell this card.
But while the X3 may be of no great commercial consequence, it’s still an interesting artefact. For one thing, it shows up how poorly graphical processing power scales with current games and drivers. A standard 512MB HD 3850 running our Crysis benchmark in high detail at 1,280 x 1,024 averaged 26fps, while switching to the X3 increased that score by just 3fps. By comparison, a single-GPU HD 3870 brought a very similar a frame rate of 30fps.
It’s only a design concept, but it serves as an example of the development behind video cards. As you can read from the quote, more processors don’t necessarily mean more power, so the quest for better graphics may not lie in multi-GPU cards after all. The source article raises other concerns so I suggest you give it a good reading. Regardless of what you think about it, the whole thing provides deep insight into what we might see in the future of graphics processing.
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