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NVIDIA and Dell Display Quad-SLI System
Ryan @ CES writes "Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, Dell and NVIDIA announced a new XPS system coming later this year that will sport not one, not two, but FOUR GeForce 7800 GTX 512 GPUs running in a quad-SLI configuration. There are two physical graphics cards in the system still, but each has two seperate PCBs with a GPU and 512 MB of memory on each. PC Perspective has some information including pictures of the cards and Dell system as well as specs and details on how NVIDIA handles the new SLI data configurations. No word yet on power consumption and heat levels, of course."
Tomshardware tested this kind of setup few weeks ago. Link to story and some benchmarks. http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/14/sneak_previ ew_of_the_nvidia_quad_gpu_setup/
Copy and paste the link; it should work fine.
After extensive testing we have found these PC's aren't able to run numerous popular games. The games that this machine runs, does so at a much lower frame rate then expected.
Unless Dell changes their software policy and stops shipping new systems with so much crap @ startup it won't matter how good the hardware is. To get decent performance from one of Dell's recent gaming machines one has to spend over an hour uninstalling crap and disabling random services @ startup.
The following is a hardocp review of the Dell Dimensions XPS 400. Covers the buying process, Dell's support, along with the hardware and software it ships with. The system's hardware potential was great, too bad you had to make an extensive software cleanup make this perform respectibly.
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTI0
Hmmm... Pie...
Dell is hoping that having a system this high-powered will drive up the sales for its mainstream models as well.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
The same would go for graphics performance. In theory this should allow a game company to design for the next gen of graphics processors today from a performance perspective, though not from a feature perspective.
Two reasons:
(1) In the past couple years multi-processor systems have slid further out of the hobbyist market and towards the server market.
(2) While it's not that uncommon to run sound processing or something relatively light in a second thread, most games do most of their work in a single thread. If you're buying a system to game rather than to run PHP for Apache, getting more CPUs probably isn't going to help you much.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
A couple points.
It's got a four and a quarter gigahertz dual-core Pentium in it. Overclocked like that, the Pentium can probably keep up with a fast Athlon.
There don't seem to be benchmark results anywhere, but if Tom (yeah, I know) is anywhere near right, Intel and Nvidia would have to have gotten a lot of optimization done to make this anywhere near useful. And I mean that in the loosest sense of the term: faster with 4 GPUs than with 2.
Also, you need to be playing games at 1600x1200 or higher resolution, with all the eye candy turned up, to notice a difference. This isn't so much an issue of having a fast enough CPU to keep up. It's really more about piling on enough pointless eye candy to slow the GPUs down to a speed the CPU can handle.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Video memory is not directly addressable by the processor; it is read/written to using the PCI bus. Even if some of it is mapped into the CPU's virtual address space, it is likely that not all 2 GB will be mapped at the same time (especially considering that the contents of each card's 512 MB will be mostly duplicated except for the frame buffers; what a waste of RAM!).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
No, see I think you missed the point. Originally SLI was to increase the GPU processing output on one monitor by combining the processing capability of two cards. However, due to some "technical limitation", SLI cards running linked like this could only display on one out at a time.
With this tech, you can now run the SLI to get the performance benefits of linking all four GPUs together if that is what makes you happy, however the power of any one GPU is as good as a two gen old dual card SLI combo, so each GPU can push one monitors worth of output and it still look as good as the older (remem two gens here) cards working in tandem.
The idea IS to be able to push 4 monitors at high performance, and IF I had that kind of money, I WOULD spend it on this, if only to combine it with some of the new multicore chips that are about to hit market (based on all the speculative vapor_______ that is Silicon Valley).
As far as better performance on one monitor, you would !!!!probably (I Am Not A Graphics Card Engineer)!!!! be getting about halfway between 1600X1200 and 3200X2400 so probably 2400x1800 or thereabouts with a massive color range (think way beyond 32 bits?)
Almost all of the information I have used here for my interpretation of these events and counter-argument to the parent post (not troll-argument) is from open and widely available SLI information on numerous websites. If you do not follow my train of logic (except for the combined out resolution stuff), let me know and I will post my info sources (some anyways) here.
2^3 * 31 * 647
they will use separate "blocks" for the power, not the power supply on the motherboard since it obviously wouldnt be able to handle it...
Multiple screens are indeed a great thing for flight sims. I'm just about to finish my private pilot training, and the first thing my instructor told me when I started was "stay away from a flight sim for right now".
Reason being, with a flight sim, you learn to look straight at the monitor. Sure there's a view hat, but in general you still keep your eyes fixed directly ahead. This can lead to some very bad habits as when flying a real plane, you have to be constantly looking all around and scanning the sky for traffic avoidance.
Flight sims that allow you to physically look around to different sides help with this a lot. They still don't solve the other issue though, in that most people don't have a force-feedback control, so you don't really get a good feel for the varying pressures and "bumpiness" that is there in a real plane.
In reality, single display sims are just not that good for teaching basic flying, though they can be used to help with instrument procedures, navigation, and other such thing.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain