Conclusion
With the GeForce 9800 GX2, Nvidia retakes the first place spot for the highest performance card, up until now held by the Radeon HD 3870 X2 launched two months ago. In a few games such as Crysis, the new arrival adds very appreciable performance gains and finally enables playing comfortably in 1920x1200.
By combining the power of two of its GPUs, Nvidia was able to create a very high end graphic card without having to develop a more efficient GPU. We find this a bit disappointing because since the G80 from the first GeForce 8800 launched almost 18 months ago we still haven’t seen a more evolved GPU. For this reason, just like the Radeon mentioned above, we find disadvantages for the multi-GPU card, mostly in the form of inconsistent performances depending on if the particular game fully takes advantage of these solutions or not.
Another downside which AMD has remedied since January is the impossibility of having several monitors with a multi-GPU system. The result is that it’s impossible to play in window mode on a screen with the acceleration of the 2 GPUs and each time you will have to go deactivate / reactivate the multi-GPU mode.
However, in our opinion, the main defect of this GeForce 9800 GX2 is the lack of memory. While the card is physically equipped with 1024 MB, in practice the local memories of each GPU are not added up because data has to be duplicated for the two. This means we actually have a 512 MB card which is sometimes insufficient and could be more and more of a liability in the future especially in Quad SLI, something we will verify in tests next week. In the end, we would have liked Nvidia to put more memory in such a high end product.
Finally, let’s finish on an aesthetic note as Nvidia made some special effort on the look of its GeForce 9800 GX2. The single casing is a nice touch and the card gives off a certain robustness. While our tests did not show the practical advantage of this ‘’sandwich design’’, it at least succeeded in making this card look attractive.
