Slashdot Mirror
Dual Video Cards Return
Kez writes "I'm sure many Slashdot readers fondly remember the era of 3dfx. SLI'd Voodoo 2's were a force to reckoned with. Sadly, that era ended a long time ago (although somebody has managed to get Doom III to play on a pair of Voodoo 2's.) However, Nvidia have revived SLI with their GeForce 6600 and 6800 cards. SLI works differently this time around, but the basic concept of using two cards to get the rendering work done is the same. Hexus.net has taken a look at how the new SLI works, how to set it up (and how not to,) along with benchmarks using both of the rendering modes available in the new SLI." And reader Oh'Boy writes "VIA on its latest press tour stopped by and visited in the UK and TrustedReviews have some new information on VIA's latest chipsets for AMD Athlon 64, the K8T890 and the K8T890 Pro which supports DualGFX. But what has emerged is that DualGFX after all doesn't support SLI, at least not for the time being, since it seems like nVidia some how has managed to lock out other manufacturers chipsets from working properly with SLI. VIA did on the other hand have two ATI cards up and running, although not in SLI mode."
You can already buy from the alienware luxury collection some gaming systems featuring SLI
http://www.alienware.com/ALX_pages/choose_alx.aspI wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
Right now, the answer is pretty simple. If you want a game to use multiple processors at the same time, you need to include more than one execution thread--the programmer has to divide the work in such a way that two or more processors can do it. It's quite hard to build a multithreaded game; there was some SMP support in Quake III, but it wasn't very stable and didn't provide a huge performance boost.
With a multithreaded application, you have to guard against strange bugs that are very, very hard to fix. If your multithreaded application runs into a deadlock every hundred thousand frames or so, it will be next to impossible to isolate, and production will end up being slower than it already is. While I'm sure that writing multithreaded games will happen in the near future, I don't think it will catch on very quickly.