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SLI Primer
GFXguy writes "If you are looking to catch up on some hardware learning you may want to check out "SL Why?". It is a short article that goes over the basics of SLI graphics. The article goes over some strengths and weaknesses of this technology as well. It looks like one video card is not going to cut it any more, at least for the hardcore gamers out there. "
Anyone else remember doing this with the old 3dfx voodoo cards... seems so long ago.
is RAIVC(Redundany Array of Video Cards) going to come out? I'd like a RAICV10 please.
- I got my free iPod and a free Nintendo DS....why not
SLI is overkill for 99.99% of people out there. In fact, onboard video is fine for probably 80-90% of the PC market.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Doom 3 runs in SFR, not AFR as the article states.
All the serious gamers will have 2 PCs connected in series to their monitor..one just for all the video rendering, and one for everything else.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
So now we have the addition of parallel graphics cards on top of the already parallel CPUs; we've had parallel keyboards and mice ability for a long time, and parallel fans kinda vaguely came along too. Parallel HDs exist with extra drives, I'm not sure how RAM extensions are accessed but they're probably classable as parallel too. Technology over the past 15 years: pushing an entire computer lab into a single computer. Considering that we'll have computer labs with these computers in...
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
I hadn't really thought about SLI before reading this article. Now that I've read it over, it does seem like an interesting technology. It's quite possible that my next motherboard will support two graphics cards.
...and possibly with more people using SLI, more games will be supported with it.
A point that has been concerning me is that SLI operation cannot be forced in non-compatible games.
That is worrisome..., but as the article mentions, the major games are supported now.
I especially like the idea of being able to wait to buy a second graphics card in a year or 18 months when the price comes down.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Just get a dual gpu card, or maybe you can have two of those! Lets see who can make the computer that will lose the most value the quickest!
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
What do you mean I need new graphics cards?!
I think it likely after RTFA that other upgrades would give you more of a boost for your money. For instance, setting up an IDE RAID 5 array with a read/write caching hardware RAID controller would give almost everyone a huge speed increase for all of their applications, not just graphics ones.
Even just adding a second fast hard drive and placing your paging file on that with your OS on your first hard drive would give most users a big bump in speed.
I could go on, but I think on a list of 10 things to do, taking advtange of SLI is probably number 9 or 10.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Would someone who read it summarize it for the rest of us.
I am Currently running A Dual Geforce 6600 SLI On An MSI Nforce 4 SLI motherboard. I love It! I kinda missed being able to put two video cards in one machine. But its back again- Although it's extremely expensive- TWO video cards, It's worth it- these two midrange cards perform great, Pulling Some Great framerates in HalfLife 2. What I really want to see is ATI's entry into the sli field. It should be interesting to see all the new system configs coming out.
With the current SLI solution, drivers must be customized for each game. If you throw just any game at the SLI array, you can expect no improvement to a small slowdown. I want a generalized solution that can provide benefit in any situation.
What about those of us who want to spend a sane amount of money on their computers? Gamers are getting almost as bad as audiophiles these days.
The article claims first that you need a $250 motherboard to run SLI (apparently a $75 premium for SLI), and second that you need to pay a large premium for SLI-compatible cards, which are next to impossible to find.
I'm running a $160 motherboard with two 6800GTs that I picked up for a good price at my local shop. They did not have a single PCIe 6600 or 6800 board there that wasn't SLI compatible.
Is it just me, or does this seem like a waste of space? CPU technology is heading towards dual core, doesn't this seem like the next step for video cards?
Personally, I wouldn't buy a SLI cardset. Top of the line video cards are already $500. What kind of person really needs that much fps or resolution? It gets beyond a point of recognition, where the difference is so small that it isn't noticed. The only real reason people would spend that much money is for bragging rights, which is an absurd principle to spend money on.
-Glitch "We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." - Linus Torvalds
It doesn't matter how hardcore a gamer is, if they can't afford 2 uber-graphics cards, they're not going to buy 2. I own one Geforce 6800 GT, and it doesn't seem to have problems in any game I play. As long as frame rate >= refresh rate, it doesn't matter anyway. Instead of buying an elite SLI system now, I saved that money... in a year or so, prices will fall and I'll be able to buy a new motherboard AND top of the line graphics card instead of having an old system with 2 obsolete cards.
The first time I ever had a video card upgrade was with an SLI add on card on my old 120mhz intel. There where clouds in mechwarrior after I installed it!
what sig?
Google Cache
Check to make sure the poor saps server can handle the swarm of slashdot users before posting.. Having your site / article featured on slashdot is the equivalent of a DOS attack..
For the serious gamer how about something like a cell GPU? Why not? It should be entirely possible. Or maybe even a dual-core GPU. Anything that is possible with the CPU is also with the GPU. It's just a microprocessor with a different instruction set. That being said, why can't we plug "CPU cards" into eachother for automatic performance increases? How much of this is limitation on technology and how much are the big players stifling innovation in the market?
- Cary
--Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play
I thought SLI stood for Scan Line Interleaving. "Scaleable Link Interface" is completly vauge. Did they change the technology and keep the old name, or is this writer just an idiot?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:3FteTnaQ9tQJ: www.xyzcomputing.com/index.php%3Foption%3Dcontent% 26task%3Dview%26id%3D257%26Itemid%3D26+&hl=en
My old Silicon Graphics (prior to the silly name change to SGI - let's face it, is a way cooler name) workstations were available with various combinations quantities video memory and graphics engines (GEs).
I'd much prefer to have a single video board with multiple GEs rather than multiple video boards.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
What a stupid comment.
Currently, the best video performance out there is a pair of 6800 Ultras in SLI, it's true, but that's also well over $1000 in video hardware alone.
Meanwhile, single-card solutions like the X850XT PE are capable of chewing through anything you can throw at them with admirable performance.
SLI is a lot like the tablet PC: a solution in search of a problem. Sure, it's a cool idea, but in practice, not terribly useful and very much overpriced.
Compare, for instance, a pair of 6600GTs running SLI:
$175 for each card; $350 total. Another $50 for the premium on a SLI mainboard.
Now you've got additional heat, additional power draw, two seperate cards, and the hassle of dealing with SLI drivers when, for $100 less, you could purchase a single X800XL and enjoy superior performance.
SLI may become worthwhile in the future, but for now, it's the exclusive domain of chumps and the e-penis crowd.
I don't understand why anyone except a small group of enthusiasts would still play PC games. Sure, there's a better interface and higher resolution. But, game installation is generally a true pain - install the game, update the drivers, download the patches, fiddle with the game options, rinse, repeat. Then there's the constant need to install new upgraded hardware (like a new $250 video card) to play tne next version of a game.
Contrast with purchasing a console, hooking it up to the TV, popping in the game and playing. New hardware (consoles) appear periodically (like XBox2, PS/3) but upgrade cycle is a lot less frequent than that required for PC games, and hassle factor is much lower. Add to that the fact that most game makers now develop for consoles first, and it's hard to justify the continual upgrade cycle to support PC gaming.
[Insert pithy quote here]
#1) Doom 3 runs in SFR mode, not AFR.
#2) CPU issue is overblown. I'm not even sure if any additional information is truly sent to the processor.
In AFR, the data for each frame is sent to alternating graphics cards. Since the frames would have been processed anyway, there is not any additional load on the CPU than there would be for an identical system with a video card that is twice as powerful as in an SLI system.
In SFR, the same data is sent to two graphics cards. This would be more data, but seemingly require only a smidgen more CPU power. The video cards send the data between each other over a dedicated bridge, and the video cards handle the task of reassembling the image into a single frame.
#3) SLI card cost. 6600GT AGP cards cost more than their PCIe counterpart. 6800 AGP cards cost less. This has more to do with the amount of time in the market than anything else. In 3 months, the prices will be equal.
#4) Stability. "...certain older cards that are said to be SLI compatible have serious stability problems when used with SLI, but, for example, not all 6800 GT cards can be used with SLI". To date, I have not seen a PCIe 6600GT or 6800GT card released which is not SLI compatible. Not all 6800GT cards can be used with SLI, but that has more to do with the fact that many cards are AGP based and older than two months (when the first SLI motherboards were released).
#5) No benefit. "From what I heard, more than a few games realize no FPS gains at all from the addition of a second video card". First, this is rumor. Many games realize no benefit at low resolutions (640x480, some at 800x600) because the games are more CPU bound than video card bound. All the games that are SLI compatible definitely realize solid FPS gains. Moreover, those gains can be "converted" into graphics enhancements (i.e. no need to go from 60fps to 95 fps, but now you can turn on 8xAA or up the screen resolution, etc.)
#6) Dual GPU cards. The author obviously doesn't know what he's talking about here. The Gigabyte dual GPU card is just an SLI solution on a single graphics card. It's (almost) exactly the same as having 2x6600GT cards. It uses the same technology and produces the same results. So what's this viable new technology on the horizon he is talking about?
#7) SLI cannot be forced. Of course it can! The default mode is "no SLI". This can be changed in the configuration options for the card.
Of 3dfx's SLI rigs. The cards ran fast, and you got better FPS than anyone on just one card, But the Graphics were washed out pretty fiercely. So it was a push. Do you sacrifice bad colors for better FPS, or otherwise? I would imagine that the same SLI rigs done with Nvidia cards may produce the same result. Probably not near as bas as the Voodoo Cards did , but still a bit. That coupled with the alarmingly large amounts of money needed to run them, makes them undesireable for me.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
"SLI, or Scalable Link Interface..."
And I always thought this was "Scan Line Interleave"... ??? At least with the Voodoo 2 cards, it was like that...
For some of us, SLI is not a new technology, although the current method is slightly different than the old VooDoo SLI. But after years of gaming, one thing stands out to me. You DON'T need the latest and greatest stuff to run games in most cases. Better to use your hardware budget wisely than to splurge on ultra-swank single components.
I run an AMD 1700, on an ABIT mainboard, with an old ATI9600. Not the pro, but the $79 budget card. I have no exotic cooling, just a nice sink and fan. I added a good copper fan unit to the videocard, which came with passive cooling. I use the features of the Abit MB to run the 1700 at 2.11Ghz, and the video got a 80Mhz bump. I see over 70fps in the CS:Source test, and average around 55-60 online. All for about the cost of one video card.
Only tyrants and oppressors need fear a well armed populace.
You actually don't need even one 6600 to have a fine running HL2. My GeForce4 Ti 4200 performs very well, thank you.
If you like to be on the bleeding edge of technology and you have the money to blow then you will want an SLI board and two GPUs. This article could have been greatly shortened by simply stating a couple of facts: SLI is new, few games support it, other technologies exist that may extinguish SLI, and SLI will likely fade with the times.
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Anyone interested in the new nForce 4 and a dual processor (mainly Opteron) setup should check out this article:
http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=05/
I am on pre-order for a Tyan K8WE which is the only board (to my knowledge) that supports two 16x lanes that is fully compatiable with SLI and carries the nForce 4 on board. Myself, I will not be slapping in anything but a 32bit Matrox video card but all the potential is there. This is probably THE board to get if you want Dual Opteron's and want to pickup the nForce 4 chip with SLI.
"No, gamers have always been much worse than audiophiles. "
You're kidding, right? Audiophiles are off the deep end. I don't think you have ever seen an *actual* audiophile-- you're mixing them up with people who like stereos. Audiophiles do things like buy $3000 cables. Or put all their components on 200lb. granite blocks or $600-per-component magnetic levitation dampers to ease vibration. Power conditioners. Huge stacks of tube amps. Subwoofers that require special basement rooms to be built to act as the box.
In the worst cases, the quest for perfect audio goes so far as to become pointless. There's an article I wish I could find for you about one particularly off-the-deep-end audiophile who paid so much for the system he used to listen to classical recordings that had he kept the money, he would have had enough to bring the *actual orchestra* to his house to play for him regularly, for years. Say what you want about huge stereos, but if it gets to the point where you can afford to bring the source home with you, you don't need reproduction.
The worst gamers can't hope to touch this. The most expensive rig on the market with a massive hang-on-the-wall plasma or whatever as your huge monitor is still just a drop in the bucket compared to people who will spend $3000 on three feet of speaker cable. And unlike some of the audiophile quackery, at least a fast machine has measurable performance gains. Try convincing a real engineer that your $1000 power cable makes a detectable difference in sound quality.
For your reference, as a guide to the levels this insanity can reach:
$23,000 for a pair of 8-foot speaker cables
$75,000 per speaker
$40 silver-plated electrical outlet (because... ummm... you can't just use any old outlet with the next item:)
$1000 5-foot AC power cable
There's much worse. Try pricing out monoblock tube amps. Keep in mind they're not just going to buy one per channel (the minimum), but probably one per *driver* (as in, three per speaker if you have a woofer, mid, and tweeter).
SLI is overkill for 99.99% of people out there. In fact, onboard video is fine for probably 80-90% of the PC market
From TFA:
"It looks like one video card is not going to cut it any more, at least for the hardcore gamers out there."
This article obviously is not about the average consumer with their onboard video. It's about gamers who buy add-in 3d cards. The average user who only reads email and browses the internet won't be buying a $300 video card, let alone two $300 video cards to run in SLI mode.
I used to be a huge upgrade-your-homebuilt-beige-box-every-6-months advocate, but the cost structure and rewards have changed. If you want to play primarily RTS and FPS games, a PC may still be your best bet, but with broader tastes, it seems to me that consoles rule the roost these days, and talk like this of needing dual video cards is part of the reason.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
And Inferior Performance.
Same article, two pages earlier.
Oh yeah, and the cheapest you can find an X800 XL is $350, not $200/300.
Well obviously for overall computer operation SLI'ing is probably the last thing on the list. But, as PC Gamer's The Vede pointed out in the March 2005 issue you can get top of the line frame rates with an SLI'ed system.
They tested a system with two 6800 Ultras SLI'ed together and raised the specs of Far Cry to full on -- they turned everything to the max. AA, AS etc. Average frame rate? 60 FPS. Compare that to a system with just one 6800 and you only got 21 FPS.
Like the original submission said, SLI'ing cards is only really for the hardcore gamer in all of us. I get by fine on High settings in Far Cry. AA is really overrated to me.
For anyone who is interested, Anandtech has posted a round-up of the four SLI boards on the market (DFI, ASUS, MSI & Gigabyte) which includes some conclusions of their own about usability, value and performance.
If I played EQ2 on the PS2 how would I order my pizza???
Throwing the page file on a 2-5 gig partition dedicated for it wouldn't hurt either.
One video card will more than enough "cut it", at least until Unreal Engine 3 is released.
Also keep in mind that it will soon become a standard process to integrate multiple GPUs onto a single video card. This has the benefits of SLI performance while reducing voltage and memory requirements.
Am I the only one that misread this as SLI'ng printers? However it does make me wonder if this technology would we be useful for anything else such as sound cards (I know Network adapters are able to do something like this, granted it's a much older technology and not called SLI)
Ok no more caffine for me
I read the headline as "SLI Printer" and was wondering why would you want that dramatic of a speed enhancment with printing.
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
For me, that's just it - the interface. Higher resolution helps, as does my pro quality 19" monitor, but it's the interface that's the killer.
:S
Show me a mouse that ships with a keyboard and mouse so console developers can *rely* on them being present, and I might care about console games. Hell, just the mouse would do, though mouse-and-controller would be more than a tad clumsy
As it is, I find most games I care about (RTS, strategy games, and games like Deus Ex and System Shock II) either don't exist for consoles, or are pathetic hollow shells of their former selves. Deus Ex II: Invisible War, anybody?
The upgrade cycle and low starting price would be attractive, but I don't find it too bad with my desktop. Then again, I don't buy top end gear, so I'm usually in the lower middle of the requirements and performance bracket. This is helped by the fact that I often play older games.
When it comes to developers building for consoles first, I'm painfully aware of that. I often fire up a game demo for something really interesting, and it has a bloody console interface or is written with the assumption that the user will be confined by console input devices. Especially in FPS games, this is *incredibly* annoying.
Call me a bigot, but if all I can get is console games, I'll just stop buying games. There are a lot of old, good games out there - and I'm gaming less these days anyway. I play games for fun, and I don't find console UIs fun.
Nobody uses it anymore to express happiness or an actual smile. They use it like you did: to be a complete dick and rub in the fact that your supererior knowledge of video cards has allowed you to claim more status and inches on your e-penis.
Congratulations to you, Mr. Sarcastic emoticon user. You make Slashdot more confrontational.
I think one video card is most definately going to cut it. Otherwise we would have a LOT of hardware vendors going out of business. I guess I'm just not 'hardcore' enough.
I have posted this before, but this perception that you need to upgrade your video card every six months so you can play the latest and greatest is just pure bullsh*t! Yes new games com e out that can make use of feature X on some yet unreleased video card, but the game also works perfectly fine on most hardware out there.
I have a Geforce2 GTS (32 megs) and have been able to all the recent games (Far Cry, Doom3, Half-Life2 etc). Yeah the games look like crap compared to what they would look like on a Geforce6, but hey games on the ps2 look like crap compared to games on the x-box as well. If the game is good, the graphics are secondary. FYI, the Geforce2 came out in the summer of 2000 if I remember correctly, so that is a 2 year head start on the PS2 and it's able to play games that the PS2 couldn't even dream of playing (doom3).
Great news dudes and dudettes. Now let me stay out of this fray and install Windows in such a way that bypasses this requirement if I so choose. The idea that I'll have to buy an expensive video adapter to not play games only a horny teenager could love makes we want to blow up Redmond campus. There for shit sure better be a way to avoid this or the stink of collusion between Microsoft and game hardware builders will reek to heaven.
I will never play videogames on any of my home computers and I will not upgrade, Bill, to the next version of Windows if the hardware requirements are more than the slighest bit higher than they are now, unless I can disable all the 'great-perks-for-hardware-stockholders' features. I, and I suspect millions like me will wait until our existing software is no longer patch-able or gets broken or runs out of gas and then we will switch to a 2 or 3 years more mature Fedora Core.
The usual game I play is called "Slashdot", but when I want something obsessively gamerlike, Nethack is good - and it's better in colored-ASCII mode, without the silly graphics interface :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The author's point with the CPU issue is almost certainly that you've removed your video card bottleneck, and are quite likely to hit a CPU bottleneck as a result. This seems entirely sensible to me, and matches my experience when upgrading video cards in the past.
You won't need a faster CPU for SLI, but if you don't get one (or already have a really fast one) you're unlikely to get the full benefits of the enormous truckload of money you dropped on video cards. That's my understanding, anyway.
As for dual GPU cards, there is almost certainly a difference even if they present the same interface to the drivers etc. If nothing else, a dual GPU card would have only one bus interface, not two - a shared, slower link to the CPU and main memory, but faster communication between the cards themselves. At least in my limited understanding.
wasn't parallel processing what the Cell processor was about?
Oh, somebody post the article text please.
Wikipedia is great for getting wide coverage of content, but it's not the place to go when you want an Authoritay you can Respeck. It's often very good, and does better on contemporary material than traditional dead-tree single-editor encyclopedias, but the only times it's authoritative are when an article's written by somebody who's actually the authority about the topic and nobody's "improved" it since then.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
mmm...I wonder if in the near future (perhaps a year or so) the current generation of cards will have dropped in price enough that a set of them in SLI mode will have similar or better performance than the new cream of the crop at a much lower price.
My Site, My Life
I had that room the following year and used the slate as a plant stand :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think all games should be programed to run on Beowulf clusters, that way you could spend as much as you wanted on your gaming system, rather than being limited to a paltry $5000 or so that you might be able to dump into one computer.
what sig?
Next up, you'll need a pair of video cards. It seems most retail places have jacked up the PCI-E cards (though I doubt they cost more to produce!) because they're betting on the fact you'll probably buy two of them. Even though the current crop of PCI-E performs the same as an AGP equivalent. IE, there's no damn reason for them to be jacked in price. So you'll pay another 50-100$ premium just for the PCI-E privilege.:P
If you're serious about SLI, you'll probably want to be looking at the 6800 models. I chose the 6800GT 256MB,PCI-E card as my base. After researching, it didn't seem worthwhile to get the 6600's, because 2 of them equals a single 6800. I'll probably buy my second 6800GT in a month or so and just drop it in place. (Same brand, model, etc to minimize thrash)
I recommend you pick a place with a decent price, and then watch that price over the course of a week or two (unless you need it NOW!). The place I bought it from actually fluctuated the price by +-$50 ... so I waited until it hit a low and then bought it. Saved a bit of cash that way.
Oh, you'll also need 'molex' cables - it's those 4 pin square power adaptors. You'll need two of them for SLI (duh), and then 1 of the regular power plugs to plug into the board (At least on my ASUS A8N-SLI deluxe). So if your current power supply doesn't have those, you'll have to buy them separate. (Typically the 4 pin rectangle plugs to molex adaptors).
I say finally to the cost conscious : wait. Or, don't bother.
The article seemed to lean twoards, "I love the free SLI stuff that NVIDIA sent me, but don't take my word for it."
Anandtech posted such a nice article on actual retail SLI boards and their qwirks just recently. The boards featured in that review were actually modestly priced as well, contrary to XYZ's thoughts on SLI.
Wake me up when the lo and behold, puts two SLI on one card and it becomes useful! Ohh wait, 3DFX...
HTTP/1.1 400
The fact is, most people out there own prebuilt computers. And as far as I know, Dell isn't making any SLI boards. Hell, you're lucky you can get a geforce 6600 from them. Since two PCIe slots cost more than one, don't expect anything from Dell.
And since none of the OEMs support it, very few game makers will bother with it. Which means those "hardcore" gamers will be paying through the nose for very little performance gains in several applications. And don't expect your open source Linux games to get a decent SLI support. Finally, what sort of hardcore gamer spends the cash on an "upgrade" that can occasionally perform worse than the setup without SLI? One with more money than sense!
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
The article fails to mention that to go into SLI mode requires a reboot. I have dual monitors. Only one monitor can be used in SLI mode, so when I get back to work, I need to reboot again.
I've read around saying that this is a driver issue that will be addressed in a few months. But it's nonetheless annoying.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Thanks, now my coworkers are giving me strange looks...
I realize that it is sexier to talk about SLI in terms of improved game performance, but has anyone looked at how this will effect the other areas of hardcore video usage such as large Photoshop graphics (600 dpi EPS docs for example), Maya renderings, video editing etc.?
-KS
I have over 1 million PC's connected together in one large cluster, each responsible one pixel on my display with load balancing just in case a certain pixel is more complex than another.
Now that's serious gaming.
I have a $300 Onkyo amp, a pair of $180 bookshelf speakers, and a whopping 10" sub. Not much to write home about, but slightly better than the ancient, distorted things I had in college.
When I was trying to do what you and I would consider "sane" product research to figure out what was of decent quality in my price range, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ridiculous misinformation and crap out there on the internet. People REALLY BELIEVE that they need to replace the power cables on their amps for better sound, etc, or that putting the *receiver* on a block of granite will improve quality by reducing vibration. (turntable, yes. receiver.... well, you decide.)
You, sir, are an idiot. Are you seriously trying to bring up TCO in the debate over console vs PC?
Let's see... I paid $180 for my current video card 2 years ago, and it plays all current games rather well. If I wanted to buy an XBox back then, I would've had to pay roughly the same price. The way the computer gaming industry is going, I won't have to upgrade again for another year or two. That will be about a $250 upgrade for one of today's $200 cards + a new cpu. Do you think the Xbox2 or PS3 will be $250 when they come out? Did you upgrade the xbox/ps2 with the Live/Network adapter, dvd remote, memory cards, extra controllers, HD output cable, etc? And heaven forbid the dvd rom in your console dies. Yes, you can replace it, for a cost; but I have so many friends who didn't know that or had to pay $90 for a new drive, since not every drive is supported. "hooking it up to the TV, popping in the game and playing." This is fine until something breaks inside and you can't fix it or upgrade it.
Next issue is your bitch about drivers and patches and options. First off, I haven't upgraded my drivers in 6 months or so and didn't notice any change at all when I did. It also takes all of a few minutes to do that. Next up are patches: how often do you get a patch to a console game? Huh, the answer to that just might be never. Your console game has a bug? Too freakin bad, but at least you don't have to waste time fixing it. There are few times when I've actually wanted a patch to a PC game, but I was forced to do it by the servers. These games are continually getting better and more balanced after feedback from players, as opposed to console games that are locked into any imbalance that existed at release time. Finally, you mention game options. Are you a complete moron? You have to set up the same options in a console game as in a PC game (almost all PC games have roughly the same control options). If you have a weird setup, like me, then you just change it and forget it; but the same is true if you have a weird setup in a console game.
"Sure, there's a better interface and higher resolution."
That's exactly the point. They look and play a ton better. The best res you'll ever get from current gen consoles is 1280x720, or whatever 720p is, from a select few xbox titles. Even next gen is still going to be locked into a max of 1920x1080 interlaced. Last gen PC games had better res than that. Not only that, but in order for a console to play at those resolutions, you have to upgrade to new hardware... unless you already have a $1000 TV that has a lower resolution than my 10 year old, $250 monitor.
The interface is an even bigger factor for me in why I don't buy a console. I play the games I like so much better with a mouse and keyboard and absolutely cannot play a game like Halo with a controller.
"most game makers now develop for consoles first"
Yes, the version of HL2 on xbox is amazing... oh, wait, there isn't one yet. There are also no versions of Battlefield, Doom3, Far Cry, World of Warcraft, Everquest2, Starcraft 2, C&C:Generals, etc. Yes, there are many exclusives for consoles that I'd love to have (Burnout3 and any Gran Turismo game), but there are a lot of PC exclusives, too.
There are reasons to go for both consoles and PCs, and neither is better than the other. It all comes down to what games you like. I'm boring and play exclusively FPS games, so PC is my only choice. I love racing games, too, but I'm not going to spend $100 on a used PS2 just to play the very few games I want from it (and at a much lower res). My friend, however, loves games like platform games and fighters, so consoles are for him.
IANAL, but I play one on
From benchmarks I've seen, comparing the Radeon X850 XT (unsure if the card is released yet) to two SLI'd 6800 Ultras, the difference is not that major. It only seems to be a few FPS.
Both of these solutions are expensive, though I think the single X850 XT is less so than the two 6800 Ultras. SLI, one might think, would provide double the power of a single card. Everything I've seen says otherwise. If it was double the power of a 6800 Ultra, it would most definately blow away the X850 XT.
I'm not even making much sense right now to myself, but what I'm simply saying is that SLI is often overkill, especially for the amount of extra performance it gives you for that huge increase in price. Heck, I can play Half-Life 2 on a 9800 Pro, with 4x antialiasing and AF, at 1280x960 resolution, and it's constantly at a pretty darn good framerate. I consider myself a gamer, and I still don't see the point at all of this.
Maybe I'm not "hardcore", but that's a pretty stupid distinction. I mean, I am in a team/clan in one game, and I game regularily. I don't spend my whole life gaming, nor do I stick with one game constantly (despite being in a team), nor do I care about having a super-duper 100+ FPS, nor is it all I do with the computer.
From the article:
:
From what I have heard, more than a few games realize no FPS gains at all from the addition of a second video card, which essentially means they are not compatible. The games should run properly, but without two video cards, what's the point?
From NVIDIA's SLI FAQ
Will my game or application just run on NVIDIA's SLI technology?
Yes.
Developers are not required to make changes to make their application work on NVIDIA's SLI solution. In fact, developers are not even required to make changes to enable the speed-boost available on a multi-GPU system.
What do I, as a developer, have to do to accelerate my application on a multi-GPU system?
Nothing:
NVIDIA's SLI technology accelerates applications automatically. The same guidelines as for maximizing performance on single-GPU systems apply. The NVIDIA GPU Programming Guide (available on developer.nvidia.com) discusses these guidelines; it also includes a chapter to specifically discuss multi-GPU considerations.
I dont know if anyone else has mentioned this and forgive me if you have, but SLI does not work with dual screens or quad screens for that matter. In the detonator drivers if you turn on SLI it will turn off the secondary monitor output no matter if it's on VGA or DVI. Now... everything in the Nvidia propaganda points to the fact that it *should work (running 2 monitors in SLI mode, nvidia actually states that SLI wont work with quad monitors) but under my current driver release 66.93 it will not work. I last checked the driver release last week and 66.93 was still listed as the current release for the detonator drivers.
I would also like to include that if you are looking for a good price/performance combo for SLI you should definately look up dual PCIe 6800s. Dual 6800s are nice because 1) you can get them in 256meg sizes and 2) most of the standard 6800s do not require a molex connection to the card itself (See MSI's 6800). What you lose on the standard 6800s is 4 extra vertex piplines (that i am sure someone is working on unlocking because you can already do this on the AGP versions of the 6800s) and the GDDR3. MY pcmark scores are very competative with the gt and ultra versions of SLI plus i used the money i saved to buy 2 gigs of PC4000 ram and an FX-55 (didnt cover the full cost but put about 40% towards the purchase of the items).
You can shorten your quote to "ATI still doesn't take drivers seriously".
when i can still use my awesome ATI All in Wonder 9000. pphhhh who needs sli.
This may be one of the worst SLI articles I have read so far. This guy makes assumptions and passes them off as fact. He also makes some statements that belie his lack of knowledge about systems and speeds of procs as well as potential bottlenecks in the system. While SLI may be a good idea in the long run currently it is just a very expensive toy for certian gamers to brag about. Actual performance increases have been around 30% in most of the tests I have seen so far. That extra $200(6600gt) to 380(6800gt) spent on the 2nd video card combined with the extra $100 you will have to spend on the motherboard is better invested in other places on the system. upgradeing to a almost top amd64 or gasp a p4 will in the end get you better speeds in the majority of games. For sli functionality the driver has to support the game, and so far few games have been selected by nvidia to have the drivers writtin for it.
SLI does have some potential advantages that this writer has not covered. In 3d rendering, real time editing or special effects work this type of setup would be a huge boost to speed and productity. The fact that this generation of cards have programmable shaders, means that in theory these cards can pull some processing functions off of the cpu. Currently people are starting to experiment on how to use these powerfull graphic cards as almost secondary cpu's.
Currently my amd 64 3200 with a 6800gt performs amazingly in doom III and HLII at large resolutions with AA and AF. Ironically esp in HLII the bottleneck is the processor as the game has to compute the large physics calcs demanded by HLII. WIth graphics getting as advanced as they are I think we will be seeing a return to proc based performance gains, and a slow down of video card performance increases. As games will be putting more of a draw on the CPU. The graphics are real, now the environment is getting real.
Personally I feel that SLI is very much like the P4EE an incredibly expensive add-on/upgrade for very very high end gamers that do not care about price, or are easily swayed by marketing. At this point SLI makes no sense. The power is not needed at this point, the price performance ratio is way out of skew, and it's future is in doubt. Nvidia has to supply the drivers for these games, and as far as I know no games are currently being written with SLI in mind. Lets check back in a year and see how it goes and where this tech has gone. And as a parting thought why has nvidia not started using this tech in the commerical sector????
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Scan Line Interlude. Not Scalable link interface. What a joke. Guy doesn't even know what he is talking about.