Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang chose his keynote address at the Nvidia Game Festival in Shanghai last week to unveil the Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 Dual-GPU video card. Powered by dual 28 nm Kepler architecture-based GeForce GPUs, the GTX 690 delivers what Huang claims is, “the highest performance of any graphics card in history.”
Packing a total of 3,072 CUDA parallel processing cores, Nvidia says the GTX 690 delivers close to double the frame rates of the single GPU GTX 680 introduced just last month and is also more power efficient and quieter than an SLI connected dual GTX 680 setup – take that early adopters.
With a look designed to appeal to those who like to have the innards of their rig on display, the card features a trivalent chromium-plated aluminum exterior frame for strength and durability, and a fan housing made from thixomolded magnesium alloy that offers improved heat dissipation and vibration dampening.
The unit’s 10-phase, heavy-duty power supply and 10-layer, two-ounce copper printed circuit board promise high power efficiency with less resistance, lower power and less heat generation. Dual vapor chambers, a nickel-plated finstack and center-mounted axial fan with optimized fin pitch and air entry angles keep the card cool, while the low-profile components and ducted baseplate channels provide an unobstructed airflow to minimize turbulence and keep the noise down.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 Dual-GPU video card will be available in limited quantities from May 3, ahead of more widespread availability on May 7. Expect to shell out US$999 to enjoy that high frame rate, high resolution eye candy.
Source: Nvidia
But of course a new product has to outdo an old graphics card. What's new in this?
Rendering a 2000 Gig 3D image of an entire galaxy in one arm of the milky way?
Yeah.... I think that would stress most things....
But aside from that?
Photographers working on 36+ megapixel images with multiple layers in Photoshop, video rendering of full HD video files, complex indesign or illustrator documents, Flash Animations, Gamers playing on high resolution screens (which is now more common as they have come down in price), 3D multimedia machines attached to large 3D HDTVs (also becoming more common).. the list is huge and I would suggest you should rethink what a typical user is nowadays.