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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.'"
There goes my savings again!
Its sad that my first born has to go..
But perversly exhilarating to hold an SLI configuration in my hands instead..
Rapid Nirvana
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
Am I the only one to find it hilarious that at the top of the page there was a Flash ad for an ATI Radeon X800?
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
So you don't want to hear about the cure for cancer until it's in your pharmacy? News is just that - new stuff. Just because you can't fork over some money for something doesn't mean it's not newsworthy or of interest to the /. community. Are you American? :-P
... 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.
What the hell does SLI mean?
Scan Line Interleave. Every other line of the screen is drawn by the other graphics card.
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.
Can you hook up 4 monitors to this badass configuration?
So THAT'S how we can run Longhorn! It makes sense!
Oh wait...
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?
SLI (Scan line Interleaving) means that if you have two graphics cards in your computer then they can each draw part of the screen. So for a lot more money you get better graphics and a higher frame-rate.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
Why don't they make a graphics card with two GPU and double memory size ? Or wouldn't fit on of these buggers into a computer case ? Yes they exploit the dual PCIex busses, but it doubt that they really use the would bandwith.
Am I the only person who thinks that holding the two together with a non-flexible medium and is held on only with solder is a bit dangerous? Not that the solder would break, but when it is removed, it could be a bit tricky. Perhaps a cable on there would be safer.
Other than that the only problem I can see is that you need about AU$2000 worth of video card, and at least AU$1000 worth of Xeon to use it. Maybe for engineers and artists, but will the average person have any use for it? I don't feel that an extra AU$3000 is worth it for the extra frame rate in games.
For the pros though it would be very good though.
The lower-than-100% increase reflects the fact the cards aren't working together fully. As they said, it's still early days, and expect to get that figure to nearer 90%.
SLI means 2 different things, yes 2.
:(
Both specified in the article. They really are confusing the issue more than required.
from the article:
in something called an SLI, Scan Line Interleave, configuration.
and then:
Both 6800 series PCI-E cards are connected by means of a SLI, Scalable Link Interface, dubbed the MIO port, a high-speed digital interconnect
removing the bumf however leaves the following definition of SLI:
"Buy 2 cards so you can do the same job as an ATI".
note: I'm only jealous, I made a booboo and bought an fx5900
liqbase
How does this stack up against Alienwares ALX dual graphics card system. I remember reading an article where the Alienware guys bashed the SLI method. Theirs, each card renders half the screen, either top or bottom, not every other line.
I want 2D games back.
And I'm also wondering how the heat is going to be transferred away from the cards. It looks like you need some serious cooling setup to keep those two babies running.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Call me when they put two GPUs on one card... Or even better, when they put two cores on one chip. Soon enough motherboard will be an add-on to graphic card.
Plus, many people were upset about power and cooling requirements. This monster would occupy FOUR slots and require, what, a 600W PSU? (ok, just kidding, "only" 460W should be enough)
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.
It's a pretty simple case of diminishing returns. If there are now 2 cpus in charge of doing rendering, they have to spend some of their power cooperating and communicating rather than just crunching numbers all of the time.
Of course that is a terrible over simplification. There are cases in which 2 cpus are actually slower than one, notably SMP P1 chips that had the L2 cache on the motherboard.
+++ ATH0 +++
1: Resort to idiotic 3DFX-like measures to get high performance
Note: A 77% increase in gaming performance isn't "high performance". Considering that the 6800 is ALREADY a massive leap forward over it's predecessor, it's INSANE PERFORMANCE!
How would something like 1600x1200 with maxed FSAA and maxed AF, while never dropping below 60fps, grab you by the short and curlies?
2: Watch company slowly die.
Nobody's suggesting that everyone and their brother run out and get SLI'd GeForces on a Xeon platform. (Those already spending 4-5000 dollars on such a platform aren't necessarily going to shrink from an additional $4-500, especially if it nearly doubles video performance.)
This is going to probably be limited to those who'd normally use Quadro cards (productivity) and the elite few with more money than sense.
Not that everyone won't WANT one...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
All great news.. but WHEN can I find it available in the stores, that would be NEWS.
Dude, this is an NDA leak! If you're trying to imply nVidia is peddling vaporware, well, you might be right, but in this case they're actually not the ones doing the peddling, because their SLI setup is still under NDA.
Buy them here.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
John Carmack said about a year and a half ago that Doom 3 would run 'well' on a top-end system of that time- which was a 3.06 GHz P4 equipped with a Radeon 9700 Pro. What's frightening/upsetting is that this SLI setup really isn't coming into play to satisfy the games of today like Doom 3- it's coming into play for the games of next year and the year after. It's just a little off-putting that in order to play the newest games you need a SET of graphics cards with those kind of power and space requirements.
...priorities. If gaming is your life (or if you're a working man with a gaming fix), two of these aren't that "extreme". People easily spend 10k$+ more on a car than a car that'd get them from A to B just as safely and easily, just for style and more luxury.
...and that was the 3rd webshop I had to go to in order to actually find one of those - most now have some legacy 17 and 19" CRTs and the rest LCDs, which go no further than 1600x1200 (even at 21") and don't need an SLI solution.
If gaming is what you do a considerable number of hours of your life, why not? Even as a student, it'd be some weekends without being completely wasted (and maybe work an hour or two as a weekend extra), and you'd have it.
All that being said, from what I saw with the last cards it looked to me like GPU speed was starting to go beyond what conventional monitors and CPUs could do. And those really huge monitors are usually far more expensive than the GFX cards, even two of them.
2xGF6800 = 10000 NOK
Sony 21" that can do 2048 x 1536/86 Hz = 14000 NOK
Personally, I'll probably stick to GF4600 until hell freezes over, I just don't manage to get hyped up on the FPS games anymore. I'd rather go with a HDTV + HD-DVDs, should they ever appear...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> Which begs the question, who is this aimed at?
I recently learned this here, so please don't take this as a criticism.
The phrase "begs the question" doesn't mean what you think it means. It does not mean, "this leads to the question."
Rather, it is a term used in logic to indicate a fallacy in which the question or statement itself tries to prove its truth by asserting its own truth. This is commonly known as circular reasoning. More here.
I agree with you about wondering who the product is aimed at, though.
This is the mobo design Alienware came up with, right? My understanding is that you can use ANY two video cards that are the same and are PCI-X. You could just as well do two ATI cards. Who submitted this? Nvidia marketing? :-)
Have a Happy.
SLI stands for Scan Line Interleave.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I seem to remember that one of these cards took up 2 slots, and needed a third just for good air flow. How much space are these going to take up? Also, just one of these bad boys needed something like 400-500W of power. What kind of power supply is needed for 2???
When a single 6800 card requires a 480watt power supply and two dedicated power lines, what would the power requirements be for two of these cards in the same computer system?
Why would they design something like this and force it to use a Xeon?
For starters, the Xeon is still stuck at a 533MHz FSB, limiting its performance. Add in the fact that they're ridiculously overpriced & most games show little to no performance improvement when running on an SMP system. A single P4 or Athlon64 will stomp the Xeon in almost all gaming situations.
Of course, with this tech a ways away & there not really being any PCI-E motherboards on the market now that Intel's recalled them all, I guess they're betting on high-end enthusiast boards to ship with the second x16 slot by the time this thing is actually ready for market...
Really, the biggest application for this kinda power that I can forsee would be game developers who want to see how well their games scale for next-gen video hardware...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Hanging in my closet is a "souvenier" from my last adventure with SLI: A Quantum3D Obsidian t-shirt. In my eagerness to own the latest and greatest graphics card I paid 600 bucks up front to preorder this card which was developed by a spin-off from 3DFx. The card shipped 6 weeks late, suffered from overheating since it crammed the components from 2 cards into a single PCI slot, and was soon equaled in performance by a simple pair of Voodoo 2 cards in adjacent slots. I expect a similar fate for this monstrosity since the GeForce 6800 pulls what - 75 watts ? I assume a 500 watt power supply will be required. Thanks, but no thanks.
-The Mad Duke
Every serious gamer knows that 86Hz is unacceptable. True gamers know: CRT > LCD / PLASMA. Until you can find me a plasma that can refresh at 125Hz or greater, I'll stick with my 80lb. CRT.
Any gamer extreme enough to buy two of these cards plus the requisite hardware should be smart enough to know that a flat panel is a waste of money for games. Then again, they are gamers...
If you don't remember what it is, just look at the faq.
I feel that this dual card thing will not be as short lived as the old 3dfx SLI. I mean, it wasn't possible to use 2 AGP cards because we lacked the second slot, but with PCI-E, the problem is gone. Remember that all the Voodoo2 had the SLI plug ? I bet that all the next gen cards will have a dual mode plug (it's already the case with the new GeForce).
The next step is to allow this kind of thing with non-identical cards. It would be nice to be able to keep your old card even after you've bought a brand new one. But it seems that synchronization is a bit of a problem.
The article calls this 'SLI' 'Scalable Linked Architecture'.
Indeed, it uses a top/bottom 50/50 split for rendering rather than per-line interleaving.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
No point in complaining. Let the folk rich enough (stupid enough?) to afford it, buy it. Either it just won't take off (in which case you've saved yourself a load of cash) or it'll go great, the price will drop, the bugs will be ironed out and you'll get it at a price you can afford. What is there to complain about?
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
200% more GPU.
200% more expense on said GPU.
And 200% more problems calculating percentages!
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
That's all I am seeing here. You don't need to use the Ultra in your configuration of this. The article even states you can use a single slot GT, which would be greater than a single Ultra and cost you 200 dollars more for a great performance boost. Or you could even use basic 6800 cards which are under 300 dollars.
This is going to be great when it matures, and is one of the huge advantages to PCI-Express when that becomes the standard on future motherboards over AGP. Yes, I know Intel is making motherboards with this, but who the hell wants to pay all that money for such a small jump?
Since people seem to be lost on the nvidia cards, here goes a run down of what they are releasing and the price area:
300$ - nvidia 6800
400$ - nvidia 6800gt
500$ - nvidia 6800 Ultra
600$+ - nvidia 6850/6800 Ultra Extreme
The 6800 and GT are single slot cards with a signle Molex connector. Those can be used in the SLI configuration as well. Get the facts straight before you post flamebait and troll.
That's scary.
So, lemme get this straight-in order to get a 77% speed increase, I'm going to have to blow hundreds on a second card ($400), xeon processor, motherboard, memory, and a damned good cooling system so it all doesn't melt and I don't go deaf? Wouldn't it make more sense to buy a decent card now, and wait two years for them to put out the single GPU card that does the same performance for $200? Unless you're really worried about dropping under 100 frames, or you have a lot of high end rendering to do, I can't imagine this really being worth it. At least with the Voodoo 2 SLI system you could buy a second card without having to invest in a huge honking system that makes a dual G5 look cheap.
The Vodoo 5 5500 had two processors and the Voodoo 5 6000 had four. If they would have come to market fast enough and not been super expensive for the time, it really would been something.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
PCI-X != PCI Express
PCI Express is denoted by some of the following: PCIe, PCI-E, PCI-Ex, PCI-Express
PCI-X is just PCI with higher throughput thanks to a higher clock rate among other things. It kinda sucks that they ever settled on PCI-X as the name for PCI-X, it now causes confusion on a mass scale.
ATI released a card with multiple GPUs on it a few years ago, putting a pair of Rage 128 chips onto a single card. It provided at best a marginal performance increase, but was still a neat idea at the time.
More info here.
For 3dfx, SLI meant "scan line interleave".
For nVidia, it means "scalable link interface", according to this article.
It's not trying to be the same thing, but it is exploiting the brand/trademark nVidia acquired from 3dfx.
"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."
my Boxx FX53 + X800
Their target market is apparently "you" - you're just in the wrong place in your cycle. Right now, you're in the sour grapes phase, denying the possibility that anyone could want a better computer than yours (they already do). Soon you'll be in the lust phase, then you'll be in the "MUST BUY SHINEY THING! PLEASE TAKE CREDIT CARD!" phase.
I remember a time when it was unimaginable who might need a 386.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Well, the mods can't, so I'll answer your question (which, BTW, is also a troll, or at least flamebait):
Aren't we to the point where CPU and (single) GPU power is high enough for just about any game without needing a SLI solution?
No, we aren't, and you're being a troll for suggesting that any advancement is "not needed." Maybe it's not desirable for you, but it is for someone.
Seems to me this SLI bit is only to induce a boner in the geekiest of geeks, and at a high price to boot.
And here you discover that, indeed, this is useful, even if only for the "geekiest of geeks." But then your lame boner reference and "high price to boot" jab reinforces the trollness of your comment. Note that no price is too high for some.
Just doens't make much sense to me.
Classic troll hallmark. No one cares whether you like this or not. If you don't have something interesting, informative, or useful to say, then STFU.
If there's a game my Boxx FX53 + X800 won't play well, then it's probably not worth playing.
Ding! Trolling grand prize. That, I bet, is the asshat comment that sealed it.
Hope that helps!
everything in moderation
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!
No, in '98 I had a great job and salary.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
CRT > LCD / PLASMA
This equation just made me laugh. Like...if plasma is less than one, just think of how much smaller LCD has to be than CRT!
OK, I'm done.
Alienware already has a patent-pending process to do SLI on their own motherboards, whether it is with an ATi or Nvidia based videocard. The two caveats are: 1. so far, this will only be through Alienware, and 2. the videocards have to be exactly the same card.
e ss _release_template.aspx?FileName=press051204.asp
Alienware purchased a former 3dfx licensee who had outstanding patents on some of their own SLI tech. Alienware has wisely furthered the research and will be marketing it soon. And it doesn't require a Xeon processor...
Here's the press release:
http://www.alienware.com/press_release_pages/pr
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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.
And believe it or not I wish I knew a more pithy way of saying that. Shi, is that even grammatically correct? Anyways-
This entire thing is really an exercise in besting the competition. In this case, ATI and in this case, they are badly in need of being able to say that they are #1, because ATI stole the crown and hasn't really given it back just yet. This whole mess is really just an exercise in brand building/marketing. Just trying to get people to think of nVidia as the best/etc-- its aimed at those who can only afford one card, trying to influence their overall feeling for nVidia.
nVidia's 3DFX property didn't have much competition back when it first introduced the voodoo sli.. ahh how times have changed.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Given that this configuration requires a Xeon based system w/ the dual PCI-E slots, this seems geared more towards the 3D development end of things, with Maya, Softimage and such. I've yet to meet a gamer-only with a Xeon rig, so this would seem to be a boon for the new Gelato systems, allowing for more GPU power. I just hope Nvidia doesn't end up emulating 3DFx's later moves in which it decides raw speed > innovation, as that is not really a winning strategy, especially these days where we're on the brink of a new age of gaming graphics using advanced shading techniques previously only seen in pre-rendered footage.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
External rendering boxes are nothing new - Evans and Sutherland have been doing this for years with their high-end OpenGL rendering hardware for simulation use. I don't know what their current hardware uses (or if it is still external), but they used to use a SCSI-based bus system...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Or, Redundant Array of Very Expensive Graphics-Cards.
This is great news! I knew that there was work on implementing RAID for memory and CPU's, but this is outstanding!
Now my gaming need never be interrupted on the off-chance that my video-card blows during an intense Far Cry session.
I'm hoping to buy six of these cards so I can implement RAID-5 across five of them and have a hot standby.
Why isn't Creative looking at doing this for sound cards?
Seriously, why can't the money used developing this stuff be put into VR again? For FPSs, it provides *way* more realism than increasing pixel count and frame rates ever will.
With OLEDs supposedly about to revolutionise the display market, could we have another stab at that technology?