Times two, baby
Let's throw some numbers at you. The two Radeon HD 5970 cards have almost 9bn transistors between them. Theoretical compute performance is 9.3 trillion calculations per second, memory bandwidth is 512GB/s, and the texture fillrate is 232GTexels/s. Oh, and it can play games rather well.
However, what we're essentially looking at is a four-GPU engine, and scaling is such that AMD openly acknowledges it won't be as good as going from one GPU to two. Some games' engines don't take well to processing four frames on the fly, as you will see in the results' section.
The pair will set you back almost £900, and that's without factoring in a quality PSU - should you need to upgrade it - that'll be another £100.
This kind of setup is aimed for people considering an ultimate system build, clearly, and gaming will most likely be conducted on a 2,560x1,600 screen, if not larger. AMD's Eyefinity technology, where a user can team three monitors from any Radeon HD 5000-series card, enables ultra-widescreen resolutions of up to 5,760x1,200, and that esoteric resolution may well be needed to tax the cards' power.
You probably didn't click on this link to read reams of text, right? Click on over to see how fast the duo are.
