The ATI Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire and Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX SLI dual video card setups represent the pinnacle of gaming-video-card technology. Both setups require bleeding edge motherboards and power supplies to function, so don't think that you can buy two of each card and be on your merry way. You're likely going to have to upgrade your motherboard to an SLI- or CrossFire- certified motherboard. Then, if you actually want your system to turn on, you're also going to have to buy a beefy 550 watt or greater power supply.

Keep in mind that Nvidia's GeForce 7900 GTX cannot render certain games with both antialiasing and HDRL enabled at the same time. As we showed in 3DMark06, the Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire's ability to perform both of these functions at the same time improved image quality greatly. The list of HDRL games isn't long at the moment, but it will keep growing.

If you play on a 30" LCD that supports resolutions of up to 2560x1600, antialiasing won't be of much use if you want to maintain a decent frame rate with all of the eye candy turned on. On the other hand, if you're still using a 19" LCD with a maximum resolution of 1280x1024, you might not need two video cards. When it comes to upgrading your computer, remember to build evenly-- there's no point in spending $1200 on a pair of video cards if you're still using a $300 monitor.