Nvidia Reintroduces SLI with GeForce 6800 Series

An anonymous reader writes "It's 1998 all over again gamers. A major release from ID software, and an expensive hotrod video card all in one year. However, rather than Quake and the Voodoo2 SLI, it's Doom3 and Nvidia SLI. Hardware Analysis has the scoop, 'Exact performance figures are not yet available, but Nvidia's SLI concept has already been shown behind closed doors by one of the companies working with Nvidia on the SLI implementation. On early driver revisions which only offered non-optimized dynamic load-balancing algorithms their SLI configuration performed 77% faster than a single graphics card. However Nvidia has told us that prospective performance numbers should show a performance increase closer to 90% over that of a single graphics card. There are a few things that need to be taken into account however when you're considering buying an SLI configuration. First off you'll need a workstation motherboard featuring two PCI-E-x16 slots which will also use the more expensive Intel Xeon processors. Secondly you'll need two identical, same brand and type, PCI-E GeForce 6800 graphics cards.'"

Comments

Re:For Rich Folks Only

[Ianoo]

It's not really your fault. Blame the idiots at PCI-SIG for giving PCIe such a similar name to an existing (but totally different) bus technology (PCI-X). PCIe used to be called 3GIO, I've no idea why they decided to change it.

For reference (not just for you), PCI-X is PCI on steroids, a faster, wider (64-bit) edition of the PCI bus which is used in high end servers and the Apple PowerMac G5.

PCIe (aka PCI Express aka 3GIO) is the brand new multi-channel serial expansion bus that will be appearing on consumer-level motherboards in the next few months and will eventually replace both AGP and PCI.