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Two's Company, Four's a WOW! Sneak Preview of NVIDIA Quad GPU SLI

@ 2005/12/15

Thanks to the PCI Express (PCIe) interface, combining two graphics cards in an SLI configuration is easily achieved. Just plug two identical GeForce 6 or GeForce 7 cards into the motherboard, and connect them with the SLI bridge connector. The two cards will then split the 3D rendering load between them, which can result in a performance improvement of up to 70 percent in everyday life. Now that PCI Express motherboards are available with PCIe x32 - or, more correctly, two x16 slots - there are also some new and intriguing possibilities.

Comment from Rutar @ 2005/12/15

todays games

I'm not thinking about a person who gets a card for 1 year max, more 2 years

Comment from jmke @ 2005/12/15

256Mb is also still overkill for most games and normal (not 1600x1200) resolutions

Doom 3 en Quake 4 offer uncompressed, very high quality textures in the advanced mode, the even say that 512Mb on the vidcard is recommended.. but look at this:

Comment from Rutar @ 2005/12/15

I was thinking about future games, since the texture quality is currently holding back the eyecandy in games it would make sense to upgrade the textures but that requires more memory. That and we've been on 256MB a long time.

Comment from jmke @ 2005/12/15

Quote:

Originally posted by Rutar
Well, am I the only one thinking that 512MB (XT or GTX doesn't matter much) might be more important in the future than raw processing power?

I think you are

the only one

the 7800GTX 512Mb is not fast because of the extra 256Mb, but because of higher clocks speeds
the extra 256Mb only gives a meager performance increase at the highest of resolutions with the FSAA/AF setting way up.
at 1280x1024 any 256Mb card will be plenty fast, and there is no difference with 512Mb cards, even 128Mb cards cope just fine.

other things need to change first before 512Mb on a 3D will make or break a product. (like HDTV like TFT monitors at affordable prices, which leads to higher in-game resolutions)

it's in Dutch, it's "only" a 6800 Ultra, but the charts are universal http://www.hardware.info/reviews/nVi...2MB_Test/592/8

bhaha

aha! an English one with 7800

Quote:

We wanted to see where the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB’s performance really came from – did the additional 256MB of memory actually make a difference, or are the board’s enhanced clock speeds more responsible for the board’s added performance?

To answer this question we underclocked our GeForce 7800 GTX board to the same speeds as NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB: 430MHz on the core, 600MHz on the memory. Let’s take a look at the results:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...12mb/page3.asp

Quote:

In Half-Life 2 with 4xAA/16xAF, the additional memory found on the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB improved performance by 2% at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, and 7% at 2048x1536. Meanwhile, in Call of Duty 2, the results were even better, we saw a 9% improvement at 1600x1200 and 2048x1536.

so in the end.. my thoughts were spot on

Comment from wutske @ 2005/12/15

But this looks much better

Softshadows are real GPU hungry and will probably be used a lot in future games.
Performance could be better if they could use the latest driver and that thous would officially support 4GPUs with only 2 SLI bridges (onboard).

I hope (not for me, for those who have the money

) asus is going to release good dual gpu cards (SLI bridge(s) and good drivers) to the public.

Comment from Rutar @ 2005/12/15

Well, am I the only one thinking that 512MB (XT or GTX doesn't matter much) might be more important in the future than raw processing power?

Comment from jmke @ 2005/12/15

this looks discouraging:

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