At the very extreme end of desktop graphics are the dual GPU, frame crunching, power hungry monsters that you won’t give you much change from a grand. The extreme offerings can be a little difficult to find too, as most card vendors only produce a limited range. Instead, they prefer to concentrate on the next rung on the ladder down, the high-end cards, before turning to the real bread and butter part of the market; the entry-level cards.
Yet the extreme end of innovation is the ground where the two giants of the dedicated graphics architecture design, AMD and Nvidia, slug it out. In the most recent bout of high-end graphics technology launches, AMD turned up with its Southern Islands architecture in December 2011 and Nvidia was nowhere to be seen. In fact it was only in March 2012 that Nvidia could respond to AMD’s baiting with cards built around the new Kepler architecture, that we'll come to shortly.
