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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.'"
These cards are expensive enough, now they are suggesting we buy 2!?
I guess if you have a lot of money and want to play with a (marginal) advantage, an SLI setup is for you.
As for myself, I am a poor college student not even able to afford 1 of these cards. A situation I think is similar to a lot of other geeks/gamers.
Which begs the question, who is this aimed at?
"Here's a spoiler: You're will die alone."-Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
... till we have multi-core and/or multi-GPU consumer cards. (they're already available at the high-end)
Questionmark.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
like 3dfx they bought?
maybe they shouldn't have.. sure they probably had some great people and so on but ultimately "it didn't work out".
"hey, we can't keep up! let's just use brute force on increasing our cards capabilities!!! that's cheap and economical in the long run keeping our company afloat, right? right??"
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So, One card that requires a 400 Watt power supply + Another card that requires a 400 Watt power supply = The need for an 800 Watt power supply?!
It's a bit presumptuous to assume that when these SLI cards come out, the only motherboards supporting multiple PCI-E x16 slots will be Intel Xeon based. As far as I knew, AMD were planning on doing 939 based motherboards with multiple PCI-E.
At any rate, doesn't this sort of make the whole Alienware Video-Array seem like a bust?
I picked up a Voodoo 2 card way back when for the incredibly high price of $300 (which was a ton close to ten years ago with the money I was making). A couple years later, I picked up my second Voodoo 2 for $30.
Think of it as an inexpensive way to nearly double your video card's performance at a fairly cheap price when others are upgrading to the new version of the card that is only 40-50% faster (unlike the SLI mode which is rumored to be 75-90% faster).
The tricky part will be that you have to have a motherboard to support it, which for now will only be the ones made for high-end workstations.
Never mind how they are held together. The Geforce 6 already requires a shitload of power (2 molex connectors on the rear of it) and puts out a lot of heat. So you have two very hot cards right next to eachother, one of them getting really bad airflow. If one of your $500 video cards doesn't die, your PSU surely will!
Unless you are trying to do something really cool like use the GPU as a really high performance SIMD coprocessor. With the advent of general purpose languages for the vertex shaders this is exactly what the GPU is, but you can't use it as such because of AGP's abysmal writeback performance. I know of quite a few high performace computing people that are interested in what will be capable with multiple PCIe GPU's plus dual host CPU's. The performance per case might be high enough to justify the cost of the cards since more communication can be local avoiding the need for more expensive interconnect channels.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Alienware took a very different tack with their solution because it requires a 3rd PCI slot AND it's analog (3rd & 4th pics). I guess its a series of tradeoffs: Space vs flexibility, with Nvidia winning the battle for space but losing on flexibility.
That aside, its rediculous that nvidia is expecting their OEM cooling solutions to do any kind of justice to the heat from those cards. Alienware already expects water cooling to be part of the solution and has cases designed accordingly... couldn't NVIDIA have done it any other way? Do they absolutely have to have a hardware link between their cards?
"A power draw of 250 Watts for the 6800 Ultra SLI solution is very realistic."
Then explain how this will work.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Ahhh, what sweet memories.
I bought a shitload of 3DFX stock back in the late 90s because they were the king of 3D. I remember walking into a computer store, and seeing something on the screen... I thought it was clip from a movie, but they told me it was Mechwarrior 2 (I think 2) playing on a Voodoo card. My mind was blown. How they got movie-like graphics onto a computer was beyond my capacity to understand. I dropped the $350 and bought one immediately and played with it and loved it.
Then, after a while, I thought, 3DFX is the king and they will never die. I put my money where my mouth was and forked over my entire savings to buy 3DFX, around $15k. There-in I learned a few great lessons:
1) The best technology doesn't mean the best company. "Good enough" with a better run company will usually blow you away. Ask Microsoft or nVidia (well, at the time nVidia wasn't the top runner that it is today).
2) No matter how great of an explanation you make, the stupidest things like 16-bit color vs 32-bit color can kill you (22-bit color just doesn't cut it to the dumb-ass consumers). It's better to just cross your t's and dot your i's in the first place so that you don't have any such vulnerabilities.
They went tits up, and I basically lost my money. nVidia bought the remaining pieces of 3DFX, and that includes all their patents. I'm not surprised they went SLI, and for companies that use it like 3d effect companies, it will probably save them bundles of time.