I think it's fitting, the week after the GTX 590's release (and the month of the Radeon 6990's release) to look back on another dual-GPU card - this one hailing from 2003, and made by the short-lived XGI.
Dual-GPU cards are nothing new, but it's only recently that SLI and Crossfire have been able to deliver meaningful performance gains for the added cost and difficulty of putting two top-performing GPUs on a single PCB. Historically, two chips on a single card was seen as a desperate act to catch up with the competition. The Voodoo5 5500 and Rage Fury MAXX were dual-chip contemporaries to the single-chip Geforce 256, which they struggled to perform against, especially after the adoption of DirectX 7 and hardware Transform & Lighting.
Thus the appearance of the Volari Duo cards was greeted with skepticism, especially as flagships of "newcomer" XGI. The company's roots, however, were from SiS and Trident, old names that had left the limelight. SiS had their Xabre graphics card resources used to found XGI, which promptly acquired Trident.
XGI got further than other attempts at breaking into the graphics card business by actually getting cards to market, even if they were in limited quantity. The hardware design and theoretical performance was impressive. However, issues sharing work between the GPUs held back its performance, and driver support and image quality were heavily criticized. The Volari Duo V8, meant to be a high-end gaming card, performed in the mid-range. Unfortunately, the cost was well beyond the performance.
Stay tuned this week as I compile benchmarks and resurrect the commentary of reviewers who would probably be surprised to be reminded that they ever came into contact with such a card.
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