Partners of Nvidia Corp., the world's largest supplier of discrete graphics processing units (GPUs), on Tuesday said they had begun shipments of Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card, a new dual-chip product by Nvidia. The novelty is claimed to deliver up to 50% higher performance compared to previous-generation flagship product called GeForce 8800 Ultra.

Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card is powered by two code-named G92 graphics chips that are also used on numerous GeForce 8800-series graphics cards. The new graphics solution sports 256 unified shader processors in total clocked at 1500MHz, whereas GPU itself and memory chips are clocked at 600MHz and 2000MHz, respectively. The GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics board carries 1GB of GDDR3 memory in total, which means that each chip features 512MB of random access memory with 256-bit bus width.

Although Nvidia refers the new graphics card as 9th generation GeForce, there is no difference in terms of feature-set between the GeForce 8-series and 9-series apart from PureVideo HD video technology, which is not available on Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra as well as GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB/640MB. Still, Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 fully supports all the features that are necessary today, including DirectX 10 and high-definition video hardware decoding and postprocessing.

Many partners of Nvidia Corp. have released statements claiming that their GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics boards can deliver up to 50% higher performance compared to GeForce 8800 Ultra. While in many cases this may be correct, since the new graphics card relies on two GPUs in SLI mode, its performance highly depends on driver optimisations. In certain case the lack of driver optimisations for dual-GPU graphics sub-system may even degrade performance compared to single-GPU offerings.

Nvidia Corp. has not released any statements regarding the GeForce 9800 GX2 performance, price, availability. Nevertheless, on its web-site the company states that "With two on-board GPUs, a GeForce 9800 GX2-based graphics solution is bar-none the fastest graphics card available". In addition, the company's web-site claims that the model 9800 GX2 is 30% to 50% faster than the model 8800 Ultra.
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards are set to be available for $599 in online stores in the USA. Pricing in Europe is unclear.

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