Quad PCIe Motherboard

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday March 13, 2006 @09:22PM from the imagining-eight-30-inch-widescreen-flatpanels dept.

SlipKid writes "PCI Express Graphics cards have allowed for some new and innovative ways to increase rendering horsepower in Desktops and Workstations. Recent introductions of NVIDIA's SLI and ATI's CrossFire technology have enabled dual PCIe Graphics cards in a load-sharing architecture. Motherboard manufacturers are jumping into the fray now and Gigabyte has released a Quad PCI Express graphics enabled motherboard, capable of running four cards at once. The board is not capable of running Quad SLI, mostly due to lack of NVIDIA driver support currently but it does offer support for eight simultaneous display outputs on four Graphics cards."

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Re:recent? nvidia? by MrTufty · 2006-03-13 22:56 · Score: 5, Informative

3DFX SLI = Scan Line Interleaving
Nvidia SLI = Scalable Link Interface

Yes, Nvidia based their version on the ideas they acquired from 3DFX when they bought them out, but the actual techniques they use now are much more advanced. IIRC, the driver does automatic load-balancing, in the sense that if there are more polygons on one section of the screen than another, the rendering will be split so that each card still renders approximately half of them - even if that means one card is doing 75% of the actual screen resolution.