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Four GPU Motherboard
didde writes "The people over at Tom's Hardware are running a story on Gigabytes experiments with quadruple GPU's on one motherboard. Perhaps we'll need something cooler than liquid metal to keep this beast from running hot?" From the article: "About half a year ago, we learned that Gigabyte was working on a graphics card that integrates two GeForce 6600GT graphics chips. While we were impressed with the out-of-the-box approach from Gigabyte, there was of course the question, whether two of those cards could be combined for a total of four graphics chips."
Other than Opteron server boards with HT slots, where is a motherboard that could hook in two grpahic cards?
Maybe if you won the lottery and/or work is (for some odd reason) paying for it. 4 GFX cards that'll run SLI, or whatever SLI for 4 gfx cards is, will probably take up 75% of the total cost of a machine.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I would hope that they would be able to get these to run on all SLi boards, I've always thought one of the main strengths of building your own PC was the compatibility between differnet brands of components.
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Now, finally, I can have the upper hand in Counter-Strike!
Don't call me a cowboy, and don't tell me to slow down!
...It's full of GPU's!
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Voodoo 5 6000 anyone? Is this thing going to require its own external power brick just to the board?
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
would people please stop making this joke. it's getting very tired.
welcome our Longhorn-running overlords
Gigabyte has stated they will throw in a free Nuclear Power Plant to help pay for power consumption when you buy one of their 4-card chipsets.
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Remember Carmack promising us real-time rendering for full CG movies? Can you imagine a game with the visuals of the Shrek series?
Personally, as an old-skool gamer, I'm hoping that if it ever comes to that, gameplay won't completely be forgotten, as the ratio of gamplay to graphics seems to diminish every day.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
OMFG. I fear the day when we see the return of VooDoo 6000 (http://home.tiscali.be/silvio/voodoo/images/V5-60 00.jpeg) style graphics cards.
Can anyone think of a reason why you need more than one of these cards? Currently my machine runs the most complex game I can think of (HalfLife 2) at 1280x960 at more frames per second than my monitor even scans at.
Why would you need it to be 4 times faster than that?
OK, I can see that a handful of people might want to play at 1600x1200 if they have a decent monitor, but usually, running at resolutions higher than that is fairly pointless unless you have a 21" or bigger monitor. The average monitor can't do resolutions that large without blurring the pixels together from what I've seen.
Clearly this Intel only solution for quad GPU was designed to give Intel back the gaming throne from AMD.... But you need to have double the number of GPUs to do it, how pathetic ;)
..then the PC will again be a more cool thing to play games on than PSP and Xbox2! I suspect PSP and XBox2 will be more cool for a while now, until all computers have Quadruple or more GPU's..
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I wonder if they could make a "clicheed Slashdot jokes" filter that automatically mods down Soviet Russia, Overlords and ??? Profit jokes (i.e. starting score -1).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The new Gillette MACH 6© 6 GPU motherboard, with comfort strip.
I for one agree with our new humor critic overlord. That jokes getting pretty stale.
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Get accustomed to Overlords, In Soviet Rushia... 1) 2) 3) Profit!!!, 640k will always be enough, etc
In slashdot, jokes dont' have to be funny...
...but I can think of a lot more important things to do with 4 8x PCIe lanes than dual-SLI. Like pumping several dual-input monitors, or perhaps up to 8 single-input displays.
-theGreater.ianal, but never mind, omfgrotflmao!
So sayteh the 2nd paragraph
I can't afford even one new video card!!!
I am still running my good ole Voodoo3 3500 w/tv-IN/OUT. For a Linux desktop though, it still kicks major butt!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
... They use some kind of retarded 1394 header pinout on their GV-3D1 kit mobo, instead of the ICH5 pinout that pretty much everyone else uses.. Including Antec... So now I'm stuck carving up the front panel firewire jumper block or snipping the block off and pinning out a whole new set of jumpers..
Because of this, and the fact that Gigabyte doesn't include at least an ICH5 adapter in the box, they are on my shit list.
This is /. , we've gotta give people like you something to whine about.obligatory speeling errur.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
But really, this sort of thing is important. People who play that many games need something to compensate for not being able to hold a steady relationship (Lara Croft at XXXXXfps doesn't count [not even as a quickie]).
1. In Soviet Russia, 4GPU Overlord jokes are very tired of Beowulf clusters of YOU! 2. ??? 3. Profit!
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
...never want to hear that joke again. Dear GOD people, get some new material. Longhorn-running overlords? do you even read what you type?
Is this four GPU's driving a single display? What is this SLI stuff?
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of one of these in soviet russia where profit makes you?
.....and a hell of a lot of porn. How sweet is that?
Imagine a beowulf ....
What about when games let you use more than one monitor? Either a side-by-side configuration, or a left-center-right config would be awesome, giving you peripheral vision. I think the 3-monitor setup would be a great way to use a big/expensive center monitor and a couple of smaller/cheaper ones on the sides.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Gallium costs around $US500/kg.
It's hard to say how much they would need in
this product, but it wouldn't suprise me if the
gallium alone adds $30-50 to the cost.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
I'm using the same card and thanks to the amigasport guys there's still 1/2 decent drivers. Works a treat on my lounge PC. Doesn't get used for much hardcore gaming mind. I happened to pick up a couple when my last company had a clear out.
It depends what you're after but TNT2s and 3000 type cards still run the desktop pretty well.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
n/t
"Remember, Gigabyte isn't shipping this Quad-GPU motherboard, yet. This might not hit shelves until next year."
But by next year nVidia will have the next generation of video chip out. Gigabyte is using the 6600GT. Isn't the 6800 Ultra out already? Would four 6600GTs give you more power then two 6800 Ultra's?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I didn't see Natalie Portman or hot grits anywhere in that. Clearly all your base are belong to FreeBSD being dead on behalf of the goatse GNAA.
My GeForce FX 5700 card already has an external power connector.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I know a lot of you are gonna be saying that there is no mobo with two x16 PCI-E slots so let me point out one right now:
Tyan Thunder K8WE - definitely the top of the line for dual-opteron mobo's right now IMHO.
Anyways, the reason this is a stupid idea is of course that as soon as someone 'upgrades' to this and squeezes out a refresh rate higher than our monitors can produce or our eyes can detect, we will have our next-gen cards and games.
Next-gen cards of course will have hardware features (read: steeped in the architecture) that no matter what you do, this generation of cards won't be able to support. For example, think of the GeForce 4MX versus the GeForce 3 Ti 200. As you may know, the 4MX does not have any shaders and the Ti 200 does. Even if I bundled up 4 4MX's, I would not be able to render reflective water in Far Cry or Half Life 2 (assuming the game in question allowed it with out inferior GPU first of all) simply because there is no dedicated hardware for volumetric per-pixel effects.
So then, instead of getting more GPU's (or spending money on a more expensive mobo just to be able to SLI) people should just wait until we actually need that extra juice - and now certainly is not the time. I recall that in one of the Unreal 3 Engine demos from a long while back, someone commented that the 6800's would run U3 like crap even on low settings (I think they said 25 FPS).
Well somebody's not an overclocker.
Cloud and Tree - not just an immature webcomic, but a VISION.
Masterpiece
hardware manufactures have to save a few cents and give us those lobotomized winmodems instead of real modems. I guess it shows where people's priorities are.
Don't forget making up a small... form factor
Just imagine when ILM or Pixar gets their hands on a few of these, they'll finally get the processing time down to less than a year per film.
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
Very informative - thanks!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
We're going to need a bigger boat^H^H^H^HPower Supply!
Slashdot is kind of like Playboy; we aren't here to read the articles.
Quad PCI GPUs offer the best $:MFLOPS we can get, especially for PCs. Who's got SW to harness their linear algebra engines to run a pool of LAME MP3 encoder engines, without bugging the CPU one bit?
--
make install -not war
At least its not quite as bad.
The 500$/kg is for semiconductor grade gallium (99.9999% pure).
As the used material should be a gallium alloy (to make is liquid at 20C), purity should not be an issue, so industrial grade gallium for 150$/kg can be used.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Crossfire may be able to support up to 32 graphic chips, sources said. -Tom's Hardware guide
Only old Koreans complain about the jokes on Slashdot.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
This is seriously good news for solid modelers and animators. These are two fields where you can never have enough horsepower. It also may prove useful in rendering farms (nvidia is working on hardware acceleration for render farms).
On the downside, you can only use one monitor in SLI mode, and most pros would rather saw off their own genitals than go to a single monitor setup. The workaround would be to grab an older PCI card for the secondary display device. Kinda sux.
BBH
So what's the next step after 4?
8? 16?
Every day brings us closer to ye olde 3Dfx's dream:
Wall of Voodoo
http://www.wallofvoodoo.com/
SGI has been delivering workstations with several GPUs for many years. This is the configuration of their Prism Linux workstation:
* 4-16 ATI FireGL GPUs
* 16-256 Intel Itanium 2 CPUs
* Up to 6.1TB with RAM
* Up to 96 PCI/PCI-X slots (91 available)
http://www.sgi.com/products/visualization/prism/
Personally, as an old-skool gamer, I'm hoping that if it ever comes to that, gameplay won't completely be forgotten, as the ratio of gamplay to graphics seems to diminish every day.
Well... The way I see it... Graphics will improve until you cannot tell the difference from what is on the screen and real life.
Which maybe be a while... Maybe not. I'm no futurist predictor mind you.
After that reach that point in which you can generate a video game that looks like real life you can only improve on gameplay since you can't really make anything look more real after a given point (well you can nit pick about artistic value and maybe you could improve the amount of polygons by another 5,000,0000,000 time infinity plus 1, but after a given point the eye can not tell the difference and most people will stop caring as long as the game looks real).
So after a while of creating video games that are indistinguisable from real life, you are left with just making it easier to make games since once you have generated a game engine to create reality and every bit of it's aspect down to atoms you only have to worry about the art.
And thats when they start doing templates where they make tools to say "computer generate me a man 5 foot 4 inches and give him a uniform and a mustache and call him bob. Make him bald and give him an ak-47 and stick him on the street corner two years north of the trash can already there. Use the average soldier AI they scripted a few months ago. K thnkx computer". I mean if everything was programmed in a computer you wouldn't have to sit there and draw it each time. I mean an AK47 can only look like an AK47.
So maybe at this point they will start devoting to game play again.
Then again we might all be in our 90's by then and bitch about the fact that games don't look like rendered polygons like they did on the original Xbox.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Katamari Damacy http://www.namco.com/games/katamari_damacy/
But anyway, you shouldn't complain so much. Just like the great stories have already been told, the game ideas have already been done. They can be improved upon or redone, however, just like movies can be remade or stories can be retold with new novel twists on the characters, situations, or events. Games will continue to improve or maybe just change. But that's okay.
My other first post is car post.
They're just functional... very abstract.
The gameplay concept is based on evolving a species from the cellular stage all the way up to a galactic civilization. You start in a tidal puddle and end up spanning worlds. Everything is procedurally generated based on how you and other players around the world have been doing things.
Now, the gameplay might turn out to be awful if the balance is wrong, but in no way is it a game which favors graphics over innovation. If it falls into a trap it will be the Black and White/Fable problem of overly high ambitions and not enough actual content.
Not judging a book by its cover is one thing, but sometimes it is fair to comment on a manuscript based on the excited explanations of the author.
The day you say "The world has gone downhill since I was a kid" is officially the day you are old.
Adults have been saying this for all of recorded history. Cicero said it.
Cool new music, games, and films come out all the time. Up to a certain age, you want to be exposed to new things. You seek them out. Your friends tell you about them.
After a certain age, you don't want to be exposed to new things anymore. Your patterns are set. You *think* you want new things, but what you're actually describing is "things that are new in the way things were new when I was young."
EA, Sony, Epic, Valve and ID do indeed play to their strengths, mostly. However, it is important to remember that any big company will try to rerelease things... movies, music, books, whatever.
For a very short period, games were free of repetition because there were no games to repeat.
As early as 1989, the market flooded with identical platformers. There was just as much unimaginative crap then. It's just that you only got one kind of crap. Breakout clones? Space Invaders knock offs? Sheesh.
When you were young, you had the energy to wade through the crap quickly. You were excited at the possibility of finding a cool game.
Now you're too old and too isolated to hear about the really great games. You're too busy to play games constantly. You're disaffected. The result is that even though everyone and his brother was shouting "Holy fuck, Katamari Damacy! Lumines! Animal Crossing! Rez! ICO! Morrowind!" during this generation, you missed out on it. To you, the world of games is what's advertised on magazine covers. That's how the advertisers like it. It makes them money.
When you were young, everything was new to you. Now you are an adult, and there are fewer things you are doing for the first time. Adjust, and stop pretending your window on the world is accurate. None of ours can be alone.
Surely there's a picture of her naked in here somewhere. Possibly in... SOVIET RUSSIA.
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Can you imagine how cool it would be to be able to do full ray tracing in a large complex game world in REAL TIME???
As it is ray tracing a single frame of a medium polycount room takes a fair bit of time...
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
there will always be other improvements to make a game seem more real. These will continue to get in the way of true gameplay, and only the rare games will find ways of breaking this chain. One the visual is near true site, they will move to adding other sense information. Some companies have already started work on computer devices that add smells during gameplay. Once visuals, sounds, and smell is perfected, they industry will move onto motion. We already see this in many arcade games such as Dance Revolutions and flight simulators. Vibrating joysticks will be replaced with miniture pods the side of a small office cubicle that will offer 360 degree visuals along with full flight simulator motion. The next step will improve on touch, at this point technology may be ready to directly link to the brain and send sensory impulses.
You forgot the breast option.
Phase Change Cooling System
High Resolution Screen
Really Small Penis
Full Tower ATX Case
Mod me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
3Dfx was going for framerate, and was a great design. 3DLabs has been designing full-length adaptors for its entire charter; whereas its last actual desktop product before acquisition by Creative Labs was the full-length (~14inch passively cooled 3DLabs Oxygen RPM. All these designs are great, but their sole problem is being implemented when fabrication technology was not as good as it is now. 3Dfx, if it survived, could have shrunk its adaptor down to the size of its Voodoo3 reference board and sport a multiple-core IC of no less than six VSA-100 chips; that would be a great thing to own, even today. Software built with the Glide API has been used in speciality arcade machines, and to date is visually stunning compared to the recent technology from ATI and nVidia. Call me a masochist, but you can run Doom3 (without the added pipeline cruft) on no less than a Voodoo2 graphics accelerator (SLI recommended). Much was specialized by Quantum3D in their Heavy Metal graphics clusters and Obsidian line (X24 is the bomb).
So much great technology from twenty years ago can be re-implemented today and it'll sell again because it is good. We don't need faster hardware, but uptime and stability and compact dimensions. I want a 386 PDA, some other people want a Commodore 64 or PDP11 wrist-watch. These are original technologies made in the United States, not exported for manufacture oversees. Doesn't anyone remember the glory days when all these foreign countries were duplicating the Motorolla Z80? It breaks my heart that all the technologies today have been pushed overseas. I'ld rather go the Amish route just to be certain that all the furniture, tools, food, carriages, medicine, and whatnot is all non-corporate made in America without the United States (Title 28, Sec 3002, 15(b)).
The corporate States in these de-jure states of this country are causing such a ruckus; wanting quick-profits moreso than all-Americans to break-even to keep the work here.
without prejudice
Second, you don't need any unholy cooling methods as it is multiple chips, running at normal speeds. You would need special cooling for one chip running at 4x the speed! :)
or else!
"Gigabytes experiments with quadruple GPU's on one motherboard"
Not using apostrophes for posesives is bad. Using apostrophes for plurals is also bad. Actually, abreviations, such as GPU, used to be pluralized with "'s", but this is no longer the preferred way. Go ahead and mod me off-topic if you like, but these errors really make it hard to understand the content.
here will always be other improvements to make a game seem more real.
Meanwhile, the smart ones will go out and have actual real experiences to get our jollies.
Have you ever had a gun pointed at you in real life? It's pretty fucking intense and scary. Especially on mushrooms. Beats any game I've ever played or ever will play.
Nothing in the article even implied that both pairs of GPUs would subsequently be merged a second time so that all for GPUs we processing the one image. Or did I miss something?
Sorry for the lack of specifics. A year or so ago a friend of mine working at ATI showed me some pictures of 32 and 64 GPU boards. It was the fastest GPU's they had at the time(5800 Pro, something like that). Anyways, obviously used for render farms/real time mil simulations. Makes me feel really sad that I'm still running a PIII 450 with a TNT2 card :(
Stop saying " Bzzzt", god damn it! Do you know how fucking ANNOYING that is, you stupid motherfucking shit-eating cunt.
What if we get two of these babies running together? or two of those? maybe four of them? we could have like 256 GPU's In the future we wont buy sticks of RAM, we'll buy sticks of GPU. The people who don't know anything about computers will ask if you don't have enough GPU's. I think that the trend will end when people replace their central heating(in the winter) with their PC's and need a second air conditioner in the summer. Or maybe one will just spontaneously combust?
Ouch! Damn... this graphic is unreadable. Does that make me a script?
Sigs are for wimps
SGI sells single machines with up to 16 GPUs and 96 PCI-X slots. Granted, they are a tad bit more expensive than your average desktop system.