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."

Comments

Quad Cards?

[OverlordQ]

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.

Re:Quad Cards?

[Morticae]

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!

Re:Quad Cards?

[taskforce]

This is 2 cards with 2 GPUs on them each, not 4 cards. Last year Gigabyte launched their dual GPU cards, but they couldn't run in SLi. At the time one of the main comments from reviewers and fans who were shocked by the power was "Whoa, wouldn't it be cool to run 2 of those in SLi and have 4 GPUs!"

Re:Quad Cards?

[Thinko]

Actually, it's both.. It discusses running in 4- 8x PCI-Express configuration for 4 Single Chip cards, and 2- 16x PCI-Express configuration for 2 Dual-Chip cards.

Re:Quad Cards?

[gcauthon]

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.

Limitations

[taskforce]

One of the major limitations of the GB Dual GPU cards is that they only worked on their propreitary motherboards, which is useless for people who use other brands of motherboards; this was supposedly because it was using the SLi in some strange way. (2 SLi links accross the GPUs as opposed to 2 boards)

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.

My God!

[JudgeFurious]

...It's full of GPU's!

Re:My God!

[nihilistcanada]

"All these motherboards are yours except Macintosh. Attempt no modern video cards there."

Re:My God!

[psetzer]

In GPUs, they don't have multiple cores, per se, but they do have multiple rendering pipelines. Modern graphics cards can have anywhere from 1-16 pipelines, with each pipeline doing one pixel at a time, as long as RAM is sufficient. Each pipeline is like a core, but not exactly; a core can run its own instructions on its own data, while a pipeline runs the same instructions as all the other pipelines do. In computer architecture, a plain old CPU is single-instruction-single-data (SISD), a multicore chip is multi-instruction-multi-data (MIMD), and a GPU is single-instruction-multi-data (SIMD). Mixing things up is the fact that after the Pentium MMX, all Pentiums are capable of doing SIMD on integer arrays, but can't do it on floating point numbers. (In fact, IIRC they can't even do regular floating-point math at the same time they are using the SIMD instructions)

Multiple pipelines at a time allows you to increase the rendering speed almost linearly, as long as you accept the trivial restriction that you must get the same image as an output no matter what order you render the pixels in. It's the opposite of the CPU business. In CPUs, they started adding multiple chips first, and in the GPU side of things, they added multiple cores (or their equivalent) first. This is partly because it's easier to only decode one instruction at a time and send the decoded signal to every pipeline than it is to decode multiple instructions and send them to the correct cores. This isn't to say that it's impossible, but a couple million more transistors are enough to make you think twice about whether you really want two cores.

Re:My God!

[eofpi]

Mixing things up is the fact that after the Pentium MMX, all Pentiums are capable of doing SIMD on integer arrays, but can't do it on floating point numbers.

Everything else you said is right, but CPUs have had SIMD floating point instructions for quite a while now (in the forms of 3DNow, SSE, and SSE2). SSE (and possibly 3DNow as well; I can't find any explicit statement either way) is single-precision only though.

In other news...

[Swamii]

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.

So...how much longer until...

[LegendOfLink]

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.

Re:So...how much longer until...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine a game with the visuals of the Shrek series?

How many graphics cards do I need not to see that though?

Re:So...how much longer until...

[the_raptor]

As graphics get closer to "good enough" reality, games will *have* to focus on gameplay over eye candy.

Re:So...how much longer until...

[DrEldarion]

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.

Re:So...how much longer until...

[PCM2]

There have ALWAYS been a huge amount of "games" with horrible gameplay. The only difference now is that the crap looks nice.

I always thought the main gripe was that nowadays the crap looks nice and costs millions and millions of dollars to produce. What you end up with, therefore, is a gaming industry that's become a big-money factory system run by huge media conglomerates who A.) overwork their employees and B.) are highly risk averse, meaning they are far more likely to produce mediocre games based on such-and-such "proven" media franchise than they are to invest in the things that makes games fun. All the money gets poured into stinkers and boring re-hashes and the small, innovative games companies get swept under the rug, or else are acquired and subsequently dismantled by the machine.

DISCLAIMER: I almost never play videogames, I'm just relaying the gripes as I understand them.

Re:So...

[matth1jd]

Other than Opteron server boards with HT slots, where is a motherboard that could hook in two grpahic cards?
Well here's the list from NewEgg.
SLI Equipped Motherboards.

Why?

[nmg196]

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.

Re:Why?

[Darth McBride]

Blurring the pixels results in free real time antialiasing!

Re:Why?

[MoralHazard]

Half-Life 2 is the most complex game you can this of, right now. Shit, I remember people saying the exact same thing about the ATI Rage 128 and the original GeForce, right about the time the first Half-Life game came out.

3D game animation is one of the few areas in which ordinary PC consumers run programs that routinely push the limits of their machines. Your machine might be enough to run HL2 perfectly well, but just give it a year or two. Game designers WILL push the envelope of technology, and your machine will eventually struggle to play the newest games.

Remember, Gigabyte isn't shipping this Quad-GPU motherboard, yet. This might not hit shelves until next year. At which point it still might be overkill, but it'll be ready for the next-gen games.

Re:Why?

[Agave]

There are monitors smaller than 21"?? :)

I will never understand why someone will spend $500+ on a videocard and then skimp on the monitor.

Re:Why?

[UnknowingFool]

I can only think of multiple displays with multiple monitors. Instead of a card handling all the monitors, each monitor (or monitors) is handled by a separate card. i.e. One for right, One for center, one for left, one for top or behind. For gamers, they could use it to create panoramic views. It could also be used for large multi-monitor displays demo displays, but for the average person, I don't see a big need.

Re:Why?

[eht]

HD video output 1920x1080, do real time rendering of movies, why send a extremely large pre rendered movie when you can send just a couple scene files (though like compiled code vs source code they could end up being larger than the compiled version).

Play game with real HD graphics.

Don't limit the idea to just computer monitors.

TV stations could use it to make real time HD talking heads, your anchor woman is sick, but signed a release to use her features in case she is sick to render her, or have her be in two places at once, or do without anchor people and CG everything.

Re:Why?

[aliquis]

Yeah, and also, why do you need more than 640kB of ram? really? ;)

(on topic: there will be released even more advanced games)

Re:Why?

[pla]

Never used one of those new 24" Widescreen Dell LCD's have you? 12ms response time, 1920x1200 resolution, and all the pixels really exist...

Yeah, but after buying one on of those, you can't afford a quad-GPU system.

Or games.

Or food.

What's next?

[brotherscrim]

The new Gillette MACH 6© 6 GPU motherboard, with comfort strip.

Covered in hot grits, no less!

[Thud457]

I, for one, WELCOME our cliched joke overlords!

This is /. , we've gotta give people like you something to whine about.obligatory speeling errur.

Could someone please explain how this works?

[under_score]

Is this four GPU's driving a single display? What is this SLI stuff?

Re:Could someone please explain how this works?

[kebes]

The 4 GPUs are on two dual-core cards. You could use this in an SLI setup to run a single monitor with ridiculous amounts of graphics power, or two monitors with still amazing graphics rendering, or more monitors if you wanted to, I suppose.

SLI is Scalable Link Interface. It's a way to have two video cards running a single display. If, for instance, you have a video game with really high graphics requirements, but you don't want your frames-per-second (fps) to drop, then you could use the two graphics cards to render alternating frames. That way, you have high frame rate combined with the best graphics. In theory you can double the graphics complexity of whatever you are trying to render. In practice, of course, it can be hard to get it running, and for many games/applications won't make any difference whatsoever. It's still a very much "power gamer" setup, only for people who (1) have the money, (2) like tinkering, (3) enjoy being "bleeding edge" just for the heck of it, (4) really like their games to look slick... at any cost!

Despite the fact that SLI is currently seen to be sorta frivolous by many, it's quite possible that SLI (or multi-GPU cards) will become common in the future, and will in fact be required to play modern games.

4 GPUs, 4 monitors.........

[pg110404]

.....and a hell of a lot of porn. How sweet is that?

Bandwidth and the Potential of this Card

[vectorian798]

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).