Dual gpu articles

Only recently with the arrival of the GTX 1080 has a single GPU been powerful enough to game at 4K and even then at times some tweaking is necessary for optimal gameplay. As impressive as the GTX 1080 is, Nvidia's latest Titan X boasts 40% more CUDA cores, making it all the more of an ally to 4K gamers.

Today marks the arrival of AMD's successor to the Radeon HD 7990. The latter was a formidable rival for the GeForce GTX Titan but it faced poor frame latency performance and enormous power consumption figures. Later on the single-GPU R9 290X managed an even more impressive feat but that card was also 20% more power hungry and thus had a huge thermal output. So much so that we weren't sure if AMD was seriously considering two Hawaii XT GPUs on a single PCB.

Apparently so, as they are unveiling the Radeon R9 295X2, the most extreme graphics cards we have ever seen.

Currently Kaveri APUs can be paired with one of two discrete GPUs: the Radeon R7 240 and R7 250. Both are sub-$100 cards that we wouldn't typically recommend gamers invest in, but when combined with the A10-7850K's on-die GPU, we could see performance that has bigger implications for value-oriented builders.

The current generation AMD GPU series collectivelly known as "Southern Islands" were released over a year ago, with the beginning of its rollout in January 2012. Sixteen months later, the Radeon HD 7000 series is still very much relevant, as AMD continues to release new models under the same GPU family.

Although it's been over a year since AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970, we are just getting an official dual-GPU version. The Radeon HD 7990 takes a pair of 7970 GPUs with overclocked cores and memory, packing 8.2 TFLOPS computer power, 6GB GDDR5 and an upgraded PEX bridge to connect the two GPUs.

AMD introduced its first Radeon HD 6000 graphics card last October, when we reviewed the mid-range Radeon HD 6870. The high-end Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 also arrived late last year, while the dual-GPU version of AMD's last generation graphics series code-named Antilles was expected to arrive shortly after. Coincidentally (or not) both AMD and Nvidia took a few months longer than expected to show its hardcore dual-GPU graphics cards, with the former making the first move to finally unveil the Radeon HD 6990.