Slashdot Mirror
Quad PCIe Motherboard
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."
Well, $topic pretty much says it all. More PCIe-slots, great, but it'd be nice if there were stuff besides graphics-adapters to push in.
Even if you could do Quad SLI, would it make that much of a difference in performance? At what point would splitting the rendering task be more work than it's worth?
This has been an issue for years. There are always upcoming games that seem too require insane systems (the "recommended 1GHz CPU for Max Payne when the rest of the world though 500 MHz was decent"-era comes to mind), but it's just a matter of time before those systems are the new norm.
And you fear that within a few years there will be games that require 2 or 4 $300 dollar GPU's just to get the game running. How many game developers would make games that only run on a small fraction of PCs? They want to get a decent audience, and to realise such an audience, the technology has to be avaiable at reasonable prices.
The whole hardware software market is both self-regulating (releasing games with insane requirements does not work) as well as self-stimulating (higher software requirements boost hardware technology and sales and better hardware results in software with better graphics).
BTW; Happy Pi Day!
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
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.