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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.
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?
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.
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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
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.
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 $4-500, especially if it nearly doubles video performance.)
This is going to probably be limited to those who'd normally use Quadro cards (productivity) and the elite few with more money than sense.
Not that everyone won't WANT one...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
John Carmack said about a year and a half ago that Doom 3 would run 'well' on a top-end system of that time- which was a 3.06 GHz P4 equipped with a Radeon 9700 Pro. What's frightening/upsetting is that this SLI setup really isn't coming into play to satisfy the games of today like Doom 3- it's coming into play for the games of next year and the year after. It's just a little off-putting that in order to play the newest games you need a SET of graphics cards with those kind of power and space requirements.
...priorities. If gaming is your life (or if you're a working man with a gaming fix), two of these aren't that "extreme". People easily spend 10k$+ 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
"For workstation users it is also a nice extra that with a SLI configuration a total of four monitors can be driven off of the respective DVI outputs on the graphics cards, a feature we'll undoubtedly see pitched as a major feature for the Quadro version of the GeForce 6800 series SLI configuration."
/., and I RTFA. ph33r.
Yes, it's
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....
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.
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.
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.
You don't need SLI for that. You just need two graphics cards with 2 outputs each. This is possible today. In fact, with a PCI geforce2 MX and almost any AGP geforce 3 or later you can drive 3-4 monitors. For a LOT less money.
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!
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.
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.