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Gigabyte's Dual-GPU Graphics Card
kamerononfire writes "Tom's Hardware has an article on a new dual-GPU graphics card, to be released Friday, by Giga-byte: "According to sources, the SLI card will lift current 3DMark2003 record revels by a significant margin while being priced lower than ATI's and Nvidia's single-GPU high-end cards.""
So, the question will be: Can we get drivers for this card that will work in Linux or OS X? It is based in Nvidia technology, so presumably one could write drivers for this card unless Gigabyte is keeping their stuff proprietary.....
It looks interesting and I would certainly be more than interested in plugging one into my dual G5, but I don't have time (or the interest) to write my own drivers.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
They are coming out with a card that includes a gpu, cpu, hard drive, ram, motherboard, ethernet, sound AND it's a nuclear powered plus it will fit in your back pocket and transmit the monitor images straight to your visual cortex all the while making your breakfast and cleaning your basement.
That makes a lot more sense, store the textures once in shared memory instead of storing it twice as you would have to do in a two card solution.
Makes me wonder if Nvidia will have dual core gpus in the future.
eom
I bought my dual GPU 3DFx Voodoo5 around this time 4 years ago. . . and then the company was bought, support disappeared, and my fancy video card became worthless even quicker than it should have . . . I don't recollect seeing another 'dual gpu video card that will slay the market' announcement since . . .
As I recall, 3dfx used multi-GPU chips for its Voodoo 4 and 5 lines, and didn't do so well. Is there anything to indicate that this card will do better? After all, sticking with SLI and multicore technology after its prime was what killed 3dfx and allowed Nvidia to take its place; it'd be rather ironic to see Nvidia go down the same path.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
The article title at Tom's Hardware is a little misleading. This is certainly *not* the first graphics card with two chips on it- back in the days of the ATI Rage chips, ATI had a Rage Fury MAXX that used two chips to render alternate frames.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Not based on actual data. Tom's Hardware has NOT run any tests yet. Take what you read with a grain of salt.
"Sources told Tom's Hardware Guide..."
"Tom's Hardware Guide's test lab staff will run the 3D1 through its benchmark track, as soon as the card becomes available."
IMHO, this is a PR coup by Gigabyte to get something into Tom's Hardware. But more importantly, why post this on Slashdot now? Let's see some data first. Let's see the results of the tests.
How to Download YouTube Videos
PS3 and Xbox2 will have clusters of multiple chips inside. How does this compare to the this Graphic cards?
You will need two such cards to play Doom4 in 640x480 at 25 fps :)
You can defy gravity... for a short time
this reminds me of the voodoo2 cards. clearly we have hit another speedbump in video technology development, and if history serves as a good model we'll have to see a real revolution in architecture rather than speed before we can start moving away from brute-force improvement again.
Unfortunately, it's only available in Asia.
Why bother.
would you be able to run 2 of these cards for quad-GPU?
*hopes*
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
... the following Slashot community concerns:
1) Does it run under Linux?
2) Even better, can I install Linux on it?
3) Does it increase Firefox's market share?
4) Does it make Bill Gates look bad?
5) Is it in any way related to Star Wars?
6) Will it make my porn look better?
Prompt reponses will be greatly appreciated.
-Slashdot
And what are the chances of a dual GPU pci-express card coming out after this, with the compatibility to be run DUAL SLI mode with a 2nd Dual GPU card? ~CYD
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
Looks pretty sweet... Sorry if this is silly, I've been out of the loop but SLI is Scan Line Interleaving, right? Anyway, from what I recall, Gigabyte was always known for the budget solutions - does this still hold true? I wonder how good their driver development will be - after all, ATI suffered early on from buggy drivers and the bad publicity which resulted, whilst NVidia managed to attain significant performance gains simply via releasing updated drivers. Also, anybody know if the Render/DRI/Xorg people have got wind of this? Would be nice if XDamage and composite could use it... Bye, Victor
*cough* voodoo 4 and 5 *cough*(there was one by 3dfx with 4 gpu's (may have been pre release)
*cough*some crappy third party card also hyped on tom's (the Xabre 800 by xgi a sis spin off *cough*
Me thinks I'll wait and see
( on a side note, how did sis not go the way of ali?)
Damn the man!
It really burns my butt to see all these fancy-pants cards being released every few months but since no motherboard manufacturer makes dual-AGP motherboards you can't use your 'old' card as a secondary display and the new one in tandem; you just gotta throw it out, or stick to PCI cards which sucks. Am I the only person who is surrounded by at least 4 monitors at one time and wants more AGP power to the other two?
sarcasm on: Of course the only reason I'd buy this card is *just* so I can up my 3DMark Score. sarcasm off
No I didn't read the article, just felt it was silly that they pointed that out.
When will it be available?
FTA: "Gigabyte creates first dual-GPU graphics card"
In the infamous words of Bill Lumbergh: "Riiiight," I think they forgot about this card.
Maybe they meant to say, Gigabyte creates first dual-GPU nVidia card, or some such. Or, maybe since only nVidia uses the term GPU (ATi uses VPU) it is implied that it is an nVidia card and thus the first dual-GPU nVidia card.
Oh I see that these latest cards are finally taking the modder's advice and adding integrated blue LEDs, for that extra burst of raw rendering power.
I know that people are cutting holes in their cases so people can admire their wiring, but I'd like to pay a bit less and save the R&D costs on the appearance-enhancing design. Plus, if this is a budget card, will appearance matter as much? It's like putting nice rims on a Yugo, I see the point but you're not fooling anyone.
Bored to see grapix card benchmarks ...
... themes... game engines ... font engines... font... need to be with display.
Tell me when a CRT and LCD makers start to include this grapix stuff into their display.
All those windowing kits
What i am saying is... just move my graphix card out-of my pc and bring in some standard... so that i can connect my computer to any 'standard' display... let it be cell phone... gel phone... huge projector... tv or car dash board display..
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these! /.ers everywhere rejoice, the pr0n holodeck is one step closer to reality...
For the Bitboys card I pre-ordered.
My main gaming rigs all run on Linux. Will they support that platform? If they do, I'll have one on order this Christmas even if I have to ship it from Taiwan.
I couldnt help noticing that Gigabyte had "patent pending" on it the sobs ,3DFX the VOODOO 5 had this technology 4 years ago,doesnt make sense, it would have been a mature technology by now, apparently Nvidia decided it was not to be undercut and slowly reinventing the wheel now .
Bring back VooDoo. Its like digesting the mother of all graphics cards and spitting out yellow looking blobs ..SOBs
aargghhh
I just spent a few buckazoids buying an Arctic Cooler for my 9800 Pro to quiet it down, and it had just one medium-speed fan. I can't imagine what this beast will sound like.
Okay, well, I guess I can...
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
What kind of breakfast is it making that will clean out my basement?
Who cares about Linux, what a waste. Its not like there are any decent games for Linux. Can it run EQ2 in high quality mode fluidly... the only reason I use Windows?
How the hell am I supposed to watercool that? My box got uber-hot once I stuck a GeForce 5900XT in, combined with my HD's and CPU. I got a water-cooling system to combat this problem. Do they even make graphics card water blocks that support multiple chips?
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Hey Gigabyte, Are you listening to this?
So this is basically two 6600GT cards glued together on one PCB. That's all well and good, but it's barely faster than one 6800 Ultra. It would probably be slower when gobs of video memory are required, because the quoted 256MB on a 256-bit bus is really split half and half between the two GPUs, and texture data will have to be duplicated in both, so there's less usable video memory on one of these contraptions than on a single-GPU 256MB card.
Two 6800s on a single card would be nice, though, as it would obviate the need to get a special SLI motherboard. Of course, if you could afford to buy such a monstrosity (and the gargantuan power supply and tornado of case fans you'd need too), you could probably afford a new motherboard too.
I had one. It had no triangle setup. Nvidia was the first to come out with on-board triangle setup.
Oxygen cards come to mind for instance, with up to four GPUs per card.
AGP is not a bus, it is a one way connection between system RAM and a video card that allows up to 2.1GB/s one way throughput. This was the answer to the aging PCI bus inability to satisfy memory throughput requirements. Now AGP is obsolete, and its inability to act like a bus (and allow things like SLI) is one reason it is being replaced.
Since AGP is not a bus it does not do any switching, or signalling that are required if you want to put more than one device on the connection. It would be like trying to put two modems on the same phone line and using them at the same time. They would interfere. AGP is just a way to plug a video card into the system memory controller and RAM.
PCI-Express is a serial bus architecture that is full duplex and capable of combining lanes or channels to produce much higher throughput levels than AGP. It allows low throughput devices like ethernet cards (200MB/s) to use small connectors, while cards with high throughput demands (3.2GB/s+ ) like video cards use a larger 8x or 16x slot.
There are no dual-AGP MB because AGP is not a bus. you cannot have more than one. If you want dual cards get a motherboard that has PCI-Express, and PCI-Express with SLI support and two 16x connectors.
I didn't see anything in the article that specifies whether the card is PCI-E only. I suspect it is, but thought I'd ask if anyone has more details.
I certainly hope this hardware is more effectively built than their 939 pin dual memory channel motherboards. They have a myriad of problems with the technology, especially the GA-KNSNXP-939, which I was going to buy before I read a number of online forums complaining about its non-compatibility with many dual memory DDR's.
I couldn't think of a sig.
Everyone stating that this had been done with the Voodoo5, you forget Quantum3D. They not only did to the Voodoo2, exactly what Gigabyte's done here to the nVidia 6600 chip, by combining 2 SLI'd boards on one. But, they also helped inspire the SLI idea by taking 3dfx's first Voodoo chips and putting them onto a singleboard: http://extreme.pcvsconsole.com/view.php?news=1944
I know this is slightly off-topic, but does this seem a bit absurd to anyone? Two GPUs, each of which is more powerful than the CPU itself? What a waste of transistors while you're doing anything other than gaming! Why don't we have computers with arrays of reprogrammable chips that can be reconfigured at runtime for whatever type of application you want? I know these exist, since I attended a lecture by a professor working on just this subject. But why does there seem to be no demand for them?
One wonders whether or not one could hear ones self think with one of these installed.
Seriously though, three cheers to Gigabyte. They've outsped their competition by thinking outside of the box.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
-eom-
I'm gonna get the Asus A8N-SLI which will hit my supplier by the end of the month. Very sweet check it out eh'.
I strongly advise you to not do business with Gigabytes Technologies.
Dealing with them on a bad motherboard (brand new) proved to take me nearly 3 months. Meanwhile _none_ of my emails or phone calls were _ever_ returned. They only took progressive action when I called them and waited to be spoken with. The support person even hung up on me once when the conversation became heated over the long wait time. They refused to send me a replacement/loaner motherboard and had no other alternatives for me but to sit and wait for the one I mailed to them via RMA to be repaired. Oh, and to even get the RMA I had to fax three different forms back to them and wait for approval, the process to get an RMA took about 4 days. Usually I can get an RMA over the phone, not with Gigabytes you won't.
The board still does not work 100%, it only boots off whatever is plugged into the primary ide controller, even though the bios has many other options.
This is a true story I swear.
And Gigabytes, if you're reading this, I told you I would spread the word, and I am..
If two graphics cards in one system are too expensive or simpry not fast enough, Gigabyte's new 3D1 board may be worth a serious rook. Sources tord Tom's Hardware Guide, that the company prepares to raunch a duar-GPU card Friday, saying that it wirr "revise the VGA performance ranking".
1The card integrates two Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT graphics processors and is the first 6600 GT card on the market to offer a totar of 256 MByte DDR 3 memory and 256 Mbit of memory bandwidth, according to the manufacturer. The card is coored by two on-board fans.
The 3D1's two processors communicate through Nvidia's SRI interface and achieved 14,293 points in 3DMark2003, sources at Gigabyte said. This wourd not onry be armost twice the performance of a regurar 6600 GT card, but arso more than ATI's Radeon X850 XT Pratinum Edition, which achieved in Gigabyte's test environment 13,271 points and Nvidia's GeForce 6800 Urtra, which posted 12,680 points.
Whire Gigabyte craims that the 3D1 wirr trump the performance of Radeon X850 XT Pratinum Edition and the GeForce 6800 Urtra cards, it says that the card wirr be offered in combination with the mainboard GA-K8NXP-SRI for ress money than ATI's and Nvidia's singre-GPU graphics cards arone. These high end cards current carry suggested retair prices between $500 and $600.
Tom's Hardware Guide's test rab staff wirr run the 3D1 through its benchmark track, as soon as the card becomes avairabre. According to sources, wirr be avairabre in sampres at the end of this month and wirr be sord as "ruxury sorution" for gamers by mid of January.
You're going to get really great Quake refresh rates. Less improvement on newer games that push the CPU to graphics bus harder. Probably won't do much for Maya/Softimage/3DS Max/etc.
"Luxury gaming" market, right. As in "there's one born every minute".
Sounds like you want an XServer with integrated toolkits.
7) Or download faster?
8) Will it shield me from the **AA?
9) Do I get Profit!?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have to wonder if this card won't just melt itself into a puddle of goo on my mobo. Even with two fans (I assume one on each GPU), won't this sucker get REALY HOT? And if it doesn't melt, how reliable will it be? Can it stand up to 12 hours of gaming in a crowded basement? Inquiring minds want to know.
That's it. I want TWO (2) dual-core 6800 Ultra cards linked with SLI via a dual PCI-X mobo. That's four GPUs, folks. Then, I could drive 3 x 23" LCD panels in an ultra-wide display array at good frame rates. 3 x 2048 x 1536... No FSAA needed at that res... 8 x+ Anisotropic... Mmmmm. Yummy....
This company has a great name! I can't wait to buy my next lawnmower from Centimetre, or some concrete mix from Kilogram -- not to mention a new stopwatch from Hour Minute Second. Thanks for the inspiration, Gigabyte!
-b
myselfmusic
and realize that the GPUs actually were designed to work together and that this is nothing more using a single card to duplicate what nVidia has already licensed and approved with two cards.
By the way, one of the "drawbacks" to SLI in it's native form (two actual independent cards linked together with a pcb connector), is that the memory is not shared.
So it's not shared in the native SLI solution and its not shared here. Which is why this board is coming with 256mbs on a single board as opposed to the "normal" 6600s that only come with 128.
See how that works? Gigabyte has doubled the onboard memory because the memory naturally gets split during the SLI process.
Also, worth noting, is that normal 6600s only have a 128bit memory interface, and this report states that this single SLI board will be equiped with 256bit interface.
That right there is a huge improvement over "native" dual 6600 SLI solutions which is why this implementation is outperforming the Top of the line cards from both nVidia and ATI and the native SLI 6600 solution can't outperform a single 6800GT in most situations.
Why sell this card with an SLI motherboard if you are not able to link it to another card? It seems a bit of a waste considering how much more expensive the SLI mothoerboard will be than non SLI boards.
the 3D world doesn't look so good. Yeah we have 30billion silicon line chips and what not. WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO HAVE SOFTWARE THAT WORKS?
They didn't (sorry if this is a dup submit, winblows got jumpy on me), they were bought by nvidia. Who says that the 6600 isnt designed for multi core? They own the research to do it, thanx to 3dFX. Who wants to bet the sli infrastructre is based off of that tech. and the first multi chip card was way before this. I dont know if you want to count daisychained voodoo II's or not, but the two chips did outperform one. But i dont think that should count.
Stop signs are only Suggestions
Innovative application of an already existing idea. This beats the h*ll out of using two cards, using two slots, etc. Not much to say, other than "cool".
mmmmmm
Yep, I have one of those sitting here as a paperweight. ATI never released drivers beyond Windows 98. So, it doesn't work in 2000, XP or Linux. What a waste of money.
I have an Athlon XP, KT400 Chipset and a Radeon 9700Pro, which is a rig I've been running since Christmas 2002. I game quite a lot.
I've been really annoyed by the dilemma of which way to go -
SLI board with a 6800 GT/Ultra (a second one to be added in a bit later when they're cheaper on ebay), or a gradual upgrade from my Athlon XP and KT400 Board to an Athlon 64/VIA KT890 Pro (which will have *both* PCIe x16 and AGP) allowing me to retain my Radeon and squeeze several more months, maybe a year, out of it, before biting another bullet.
I guess this settles it. Here (KT890Pro + single-slot SLI) is my cheap upgrade solution that will both milk my Radeon a while longer, and by the time its spent, one can assume a single-card equivalent such as this of the then-most-cost-efficient high-end SLI setup will take its place in the PEG slot. Hopefully, it will be dual-DVI as well.
Assuming, of course, this "SLI card" will function in a standard x16 slot, as opposed to an SLI Mobo.
-
looks like they resurfaced :-)
I hope ATI is watching and planning something accordingly with their next gpu.
With their chips being lower power and less heat, I would think sticking 2 gpu's would be a smart move. Or even better, able to put 2 mobile gpu's in it, so you could upgrade to newer gpus when they come out.
Be seeing you...
I've been power gaming for 6 years, and regardless of how well the chip performs in benchmarks, this is very good for all of us gamers. The important thing is this ups the ante for all chip manufacturers. The first one doubles their power, albiet it inefficiently, and it isn't too long until competition forces the others to follow suit(ideally sans the inefficiencies). Hooray!
What I like about this SLI trend is that by spending ungodly amounts of cash now on a multi-GPU solution it is possible to "simulate" the performance of next year's single GPU card.
Game developers can more realistically target a platform that does not really exist yet (because a cutting edge dual card or dual-GPU solution is too expensive for most people).
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
"The card is cooled by two on-board fans." Suuuper. Really cool. Statistically, one out of two fans will fail twice as often as a single fan. In other words, the MTBF is halved, while the noise is raised by 3 dB. And the assembly doesn't exactly look like you can easily replace the fans by aftermarket fans. I wonder how this spiffy card performs when one of the GPUs blows up. But maybe the PCB has some predetermined breaking points to punch out a blown GPU. This will also reduce the blue light by 3 dB. Bad for gamers.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Clinging to an old platform. That's REALLY where the problems started. 3dfx basically had only 2 architectures in the entire history of the company: Voodoo and VSA-100.
The orignal was, of course, Voodoo and man was it ground breaking. When they first did a tech demo on simulator hardware, competitors laughed at them. A year later, when it was being done on production hardware, the competitors were sitting taking notes.
So next came the Voodoo 2, which was a big leap forward in performance terms. However, it was still the same architecture, just tweaked a bit. The clock speed was increased and it was modified to allow for 3 texture units, and two was made standard. The orignial Voodoo actually supported multiple texture units, however only extrememly high end card like those form Quantum 3D used it. Tweaks aside, it was just a Voodoo. The second texture unit and higher clock speed made it much faster, but there was no new technology.
Then came the Voodoo 3. Again some tweaks and speed increases, but no changes. The took the pixel and 2 texture chips and put them on a single chip along with a 3d chip and cranked the clock speed up again, but it was still jsut Voodoo technology. No changes to the underlying architecture were made.
And there it sat, for a LONG time. I remember, as I was a huge Voodoo fan. The TNT2 came out and, though not faster than the Voodoo 3 for most games, it did support features the Voodoo did not. Then came the GeForce and I just couldn't resist any longer.
Well finally 3dfx came out with something new, the VSA-100. It was a fairly large update do the architecture, though not as big as something like the GeForce 2 -> GeForce 3 change, but still finally a real change to the architecture. However at that point it was too little, too late as the GeForce 2 was already out and there just wasn't any real competition.
The insistance on Glide was another relic from the problem of single architecture. When the Voodoo 1 was created, it was just infeasable to implement any existing API as the primary API. The 3d capabilites of DirectX were laughable at best, and OpenGL simply demanded a feature set that the Voodoo could not provide. So 3dfx did something rather innovative: The created a stripped GL that gave what you needed for games, yet could run fast with their cards.
However, as the cards failed to advance in design, so did the API. DirectX came into its own and card advanced to the point that GL support wasn't only possible, but trivial. Glide became a relic, espically when nVidia declared that there was to be no proprietary API with their cards, they were DX/GL native.
Basically, their big mistake was failure to advance architecture. In the 3d world, architectures change fast. When you make one, you only get 1-2 years out of it, then you need ot be introducing a new one, with better features. Modifications and advancements are fine, but you have to rededign the whole thing at a frightening pace to keep up. nVidia and ATi ahve done that well, 3dfx failed to, and failed as a company for it.
Anyone else have two of these running in SLI mode? They rocked!!!! (though the setup cost a bit)
All paths perilous, no acts meaningless.
For the Bitboys card I pre-ordered.
They could have been so successful if they hadn't optimised their instruction set for rendering hello.jpg.
I really wish God would just release the source code for humans, or at least give us a firmware upgrade, new drivers and/or a Service Pack. Because most humans I meet are more buggy and vulnerable than any hole in M$ Windows. Step anywhere outside of your house (maybe inside as well) and you'll see that the 'Idiot Bug' is running rampant. Come to think of it, that's probably how we ended up w/ Dubya as the leader of the free world.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)