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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."
Not necessarily.
It's the same concept as a Beowulf supercomputer.
With the possiblity of parallelism, we can use cheaper cards in tandem and get the same power as a high end graphics card (or one that doesn't exist) for far less money.
It also helps things like failure--if one node fails you can simply replace it without the entire system (your $1000 graphics card) going down.
Redundant systems and parallel computing are the wave of the future wooooooo!
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.
As graphics get closer to "good enough" reality, games will *have* to focus on gameplay over eye candy.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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
...never want to hear that joke again. Dear GOD people, get some new material. Longhorn-running overlords? do you even read what you type?
as the ratio of gamplay to graphics seems to diminish every day
Yes, because games like Knights of the Old Republic, the Zelda series, Gran Turismo 4, the upcoming Will Wright game Spore, World of Warcraft, and so on and so on and so on have absolutely horrible gameplay!
It always makes me laugh to hear "old-school" gamers complain about companies putting graphics ahead of gameplay. Do you not remember the LEGIONS of horrible games on the NES/SMS/Genesis/SNES/etc? There were TONS of games where basically the only gameplay that was there was "dodge this stuff and shoot this stuff".
There have ALWAYS been a huge amount of "games" with horrible gameplay. The only difference now is that the crap looks nice.
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).
A cluster of X components is never going to be as reliable as a single component. If you buy more of something then your odds of seeing a defect go up, not down. You are correct in that if one card fails then you only need to replace the one card. However, your odds of a card failing are now four times as likely. Supercomputers are not for the thrifty and neither are multi-gpu systems.
DISCLAIMER: I almost never play videogames, I'm just relaying the gripes as I understand them.
Breakfast served all day!