The arrival of a new mainstream NVIDIA core, GF114, posed a very interesting question: how well will this product perform in SLI mode? Since we‘ve got a pair of graphics cards like that on our hands, we decided to check it out.

Announced on the 25th of January, NVIDIA’s new mainstream graphics processor GF114 became the heart of one of the company’s most winning products ever. Priced at $250, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti proved to be faster than the comparably priced Radeon HD 6870 and often as good as the more expensive Radeon HD 6950 in our tests. It is just a perfect mainstream card, like the Radeon HD 4850 used to be in 2008, for example.

Today, we’ve got another story to tell you, though. AMD have been busy preparing its two-headed monster. Codenamed “Antilles”, the Radeon HD 6990 is going to dominate in the premium market sector, replacing the good old Radeon HD 5970 which itself should be given credit for having held the title of the world’s fastest graphics card up to this day. NVIDIA don’t seem to be in a hurry to do anything about AMD’s supremacy in this field. As you know, they have never rolled out dual-chip products with two GF100 or GF104 processors. Of course, NVIDIA’s single-chip GeForce GTX 580 is capable of meeting the demands of the overwhelming majority of users, yet the lack of a new dual-chip product isn’t good for the company’s image.

Our tests of a GeForce GTX 570 SLI configuration showed its performance to be high enough for a successor to the GeForce GTX 295 if it were implemented as a single card. However, the engineers are going to have a lot of difficulties to overcome when they get to design it. Particularly, they will have to wire two 320-bit memory buses (or even two 384-bit buses if NVIDIA is that ambitious) and yet leave enough space to install as many as 24 chips of GDDR5 memory.

• READ MORE (Source): NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti SLI Review – X-bit labs