Sapphire Technology, the world"s largest producer of ATI Radeon-based graphics cards, unveiled at Consumer Electronics Show the industry"s first dual-chip graphics card based on the Radeon X1950 Pro graphics processing units (GPUs). The novelty may offer pretty high performance, however, due to lack of DirectX 10 support, its market prospects are uncertain. As revealed earlier, Sapphire"s Radeon X1950 Pro Dual is a bulky graphics card that carries two Radeon X1950 Pro GPUs that work in CrossFire mode, 1GB of GDDR3 memory and a bridge chip. The board has two power connectors and may not fit into typical computer cases, but require large, enthusiast-oriented, chassis. Sapphire also confirmed that in future it will be possible to make two dual-chip graphics boards work together, thus providing 4-way multi-GPU performance.
"The same thickness as a standard two slot graphics card, the Sapphire X1950 Pro Dual connects via a single PCI-Express x16 slot, bringing dual-GPU performance to mainboards with only one PCI Express connector, and opening up the future possibility of the world"s first Quad AMD GPU operation in an ATI CrossFire mainboard," a statement by Sapphire reads.