How to sell the highest end - and correspondingly highest price - graphics cards in today's market?
Well, antialiasing, textures and effects might not be enough to justify spending the extra dosh. How about the real thing, many more pixels to load those GPUs further? After all, much higher resolution not only enables you to watch the upcoming "beyond HD" video content, but also better fonts in your documents, larger spreadsheets and multiple web pages open at the same time.
So the Asus graphics girl, Michelle Chen, put together a lovely display where twin Asus Mars dual-GTX285 cards - yes, the grand total of quad-SLI GTX285, a four GPU combo in two slots - drove a biiiig 56-inch ChiMei 3840x2160, 16:9 aspect ratio QuadHD display. The eight megapixel (or as Jen-Hsun at Nvidia would call it, XHD2) resolution is still a bit less than the six-year old 22-inch IBM T221 3840x2400 16:10 Golden Ratio monitor, which is ideal for any kind of usage, but it's a big step forward, especially as games can now make more use of such high resolutions.
As you can see, it's a perfect graphics and monitor match. With MARS, Asus managed to do its own version of a "beyond GTX295" dual GPU card. It has two full-speed GTX285 cards per slot, a total of 2GB RAM, a full complement of 240 shaders and 512-bit buses per GPU. (I also hope it gets the 670MHz GPU OC speed factory preset.) Asus matched the dual MARS setup with a good monitor able to actually use the twin dual-GPU quad-SLI setup to the fullest.
If you're not in the mood to spend thousands for the whole outfit, dual ROG Matrix GTX285 OC cards can provide much of the same pleasure at lower cost.
Now, I wouldn't mind a 26-inch or 32-inch 4096x2400 monitor here. With it, I can watch high end 4K pixel screen width digital video camera recordings native, and also handle all the older PC resolutions without interpolation at or near full screen. Asus monitor division, where art thou?