NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 On Linux?

Back in January AMD had introduced the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and this morning NVIDIA has counter-attacked them by unleashing the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2. The GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card is made up of two GeForce G9x 65nm GPUs with each one being clocked at 600MHz and each having 128 stream processors and 512MB of 1GHz GDDR3 memory. These two GPUs are on the same PCB and connected via Scalable Link Interface. Early Windows benchmarks show the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 slaughtering the Radeon HD 3870 X2, but AMD's dual-GPU offering is priced much lower.

We don't have any Linux benchmarks of the GeForce 9800 GX2 to pass along today, nor has NVIDIA released an official Linux driver update supporting this new dual-GPU high-end solution (though it may work with 171.06 that had delivered Linux GeForce 9600GT support). Though as one would expect, NVIDIA will soon be releasing a new Linux driver. We would suspect that it will be the first stable release in their 171.xx Linux series (presumably 171.08 or 171.09). Fortunately, as we shared last year, NVIDIA has corrected much of their SLI performance issues under Linux. Once this new NVIDIA Linux driver is out, we'll tell you more.