Up Close with nVidia's Quad SLI

but you are right that they are marketing this Quad SLI setup so you could game at insane resolutions, but you can't turn on the eye candy (AA/AF)

and at 1600x1200 / 1280x1024 a single 7900GTX can be sufficient; 2x7900GTX are limit overkill

650...
sounds nice.

monaco in two hours

yes I can read Doc - but even with 8 of them you won't be able to play games at the resolution with AA enabled.

simple fact is that the GPU tech currently does not allow such high resolutions with AA enabled to run fluently

be it 1/2/4/8/16 cards in SLI

four gpu's John, not two, four!

it's like demanding that your new car goes 650km/h

what I mean is that all the sellers selling quadsli promote this kind of gaming, and it's a total improbability.
19200*1200 with 4aa and 16af multisampling is the only certainty for slisetups/crossfire, quad sli will probably yield just one more resolutionbump.

Are you surprised at 2560*1600 gives unplayable performance when using AA ?

/me not at all, it's not because you pay €6000 for a PC that that means you should be able to play at such insane resolutions

it would be nice -- but let's not dream

first and foremost, I love Firingsquad Hardware reviews, but this is what I mean, any game tested at these insane resolutions...isn't playable, firingsquad tests 2560*1600 performance, but the only way to make some of them playable is when omitting all iq settings
linkie

quake 4 : 120 fps at 2560*1600, but without af or aa, what's that about? when you buy a 2000 euro monitor and a 1000 euro gpu setup, you'd expect to put on at least some aa of af, you will notice goddamn jaggies even at this resolution on a 30" monitor!! predicting the effect of 4aa and 16af on these results is impossible so it doesn't mean anything...

cod2 gets 40-ish fps mean! that means frequent sub30 drops probably, with that extreme setup probably 6000+ euro's in total and that's with NO AA and 8*af... 4aa would probably get you 15 fps or so...to get this remotely playable with 4*aa and the same amount of af, we'd need at the least a tripling of the gpupower in this game at this resolution...my guess is a quad gpu setup will get you 30-40% of increase : NOT ENOUGH!! unplayable...

halflife lost coast HDR : NO aa, 8 af , 60- ish mean fps (probably playable), get that 4 aa on and you have probably 30-40 fps mean with sub30 drops: UNPLAYABLE , maybe a quad gpu would make that just playable.

fear at this resolution with no aa gets you about 60fps with minimum of 41 : perfectly playable with that dual 7900 gtx, enabling aa will cut that down even at 2*aa levels to just merely playable, 4 aa will make it unplayable, quad gpu probably could make that just playable

assuming there is an increase of quad gpu of 40% (which probably won't be so, lower clocks and all that count too)



BUT THESE ARE ALL 'PROBABLY PLAYABLE' tags at 4*aa, take an educated guess if 8*aa will work (NO IT WON'T) let alone 16 or 32*aa

don't mind the fact that you don't see the difference between 8x AA and 16x/32x

Run any recent game at that resolution with 32sli aa : SLIDESHOW

marketing crap