Slashdot Mirror
The First Quad SLI Benchmarks
An anonymous reader writes "X-bit labs have a preview of NVIDIA's Quad SLI system based on two GeForce 7900 GX2 cards. On each GeForce 7900 GX2 is allocated 512 MB of on-board memory, which is connected through a special bridge chip with 16X PCIe lanes to the other daughter card and the system. The two GPUs on the card work in SLI mode. The core and memory are clocked lower than a single GPU card at 550 MHz and 1.2GHz (DDR). For Quad SLI, NVIDIA has introduced a new mode of SLI, AFR of SFR where each card alternately renders a frame split between the two GPUs of one card after the other. The GX2 cards are benched (when possible) at resolution of 2560 by 1600 with 32X SLI AA and compared to a Crossfire x1900 XTX system on a variety of games."
Hell That Is A Lot Of Acronyms
Why is this?
Its obvious we expect more processing power, but the prices nowadays are silly.
Its also fucked up the benchmarking because you can't just look for the card your interested in, you have to check for it being in SLI or QSLI mode.
liqbase
Twenty-seven pages? Gimme a fucking break. Think they're milking it a touch?
Fuck Everything, We're Doing FOUR Graphics Cards
Who cares about quad SLI, gimme the octet SLI, I just sold my house and I'm ready to buy one.
I wonder what percentage of people who will be running quad sli 7900's live in their parents basement.
Although I'm a college student, my experences are that once people graduate college(and are making the money to afford these toys), generally they realize what a waste of money it is to stay on the bleeding edge of PC Gaming tech
I don't know though, perhaps there is a larger market for these than I think.
...But good luck getting anything but the demo that ships with your prepackaged pair of identical cards to run on such a setup.
Don't worry, though - The sequel to your favorite game might support such a configuration (assuming you have the right card model, the right rev of that model, the right motherboard, the right BIOS, and the right OS) somewhere around the time single-GPU cards have 8x (i.e. twice what this would yield, if you can get it to work) the power of anything available today.
Does this have serious geek-cred? Sure. Would anyone but a total masochist try to run such a configuration, for anything more than bragging rights? HELL no!
This will be yester year's technology when the next architecture comes out. In the video card market new archs seem to happen every year. My new cap on video cards is $300/year. I got a 7900gt, you can do a voltage mod and buy a $30 cooler and by overclocking, get the same performance as a 7900gtx. They both use the exact same gpus. Google for guides
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
What is the reason for this? Why would you spend $1000 for high framerate? At least for casual (or even hardcore) gaming, I find this stupid.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
At least the good folks at Xbit Labs have a printer friendly link.
d eo/print/geforce7900-quad-sli.html
http://www.xbitlabs.com.nyud.net:8090/articles/vi
Probably good to have a Coralized link anyways, their site was slowing down for me.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Who actually has a monitor capable of such a high resolution?
Secondly, correct me if I'm wrong, but CrossFire currently is two cards side by side, and if four cards don't perform significantly better than two, I'd be very worried.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
Quad SLI is also two physical cards.
I think the site has been Slashdotted...
How much does it take to cool these things?
Even if someone gave me $1k and told me I could only use it on a quad-sli setup, I don't think I'd take it, mainly because I suspect that the cards would fry everything in a five-mile radius without watercooling.
"...Nvidia GeForce 7900 quad SLI is not faster than ATI Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire (which is known for high performance in high resolutions and with FSAA) across the board and may even lose to dual GeForce 7900 GTX setup."
So... can anyone explain *what's the point* then?
That's what really gets me when the Republicans bash the Democrats for alternatives to gasoline, saying that it costs the average person more money. It costs people who buy those sorts of things more money. It is an incomplete substitute for the gas market and will take price pressure off of that market.
For a demonstration of what true low-latency game-play is like, try playing something like Kaboom! with a paddle on a real Atari 2600... no double-buffering there!
its really nothing compared to say a porsche:P and you do see expensive cars being driven around, so the money is out there.
is it necessary? perhaps, look at oblivion, it totally rapes current 2 card sli. whereas with other games one can fsaa+af while running at insane resolutions normal sli cant even handle max settings really in oblivion. let alone with fsaa/af
As the article starts out with:
You can buy a $200,000 Italian sports car or a $30,000 Japanese car and add $20,000 in parts to get almost the same performance. But you'll likely never get the same shit-eating grin.
Now, for most people, a Ford or a Honda is plenty. They'd much rather have an OK car and the $180,000 difference that they never had anyway. But that doesn't devalue what Ferrari or Lambourghini offer those who are willing to pay for it.
Similarly, yes, 1960's Ferrari probably can't hold a candle to 1980's higher end Nissan - but the driver who can afford a Ferrari in 1960 has had 20 years of awesome enthusiast's driving and has likely bought 1980's Ferrari that Nissan's 1980 model still can't touch.
Granted, timescales are the same in the gaming world but there is still a period of time where you have a significantly faster system. Sure, it may only be 12 months, not 20 years... But then it only costs $500-1500 more every 12 months ($10,000-$30,000 over 20 years) rather than $150,000 more once every 20.
The point is, these things aren't for everyone. But a lucky few get to live in a world where such options are possible and are quite happy to pay many times the cost if only for that exclusive 20% extra - and, as with cars, it gives those who're fans of the genre but don't have the money fun dreams to drool over.
For what it's worth, I'm guessing the Indian programmer that's about to take your job laughs at your craziness for buying a $20-30,000 car when he gets much better price/performance from a cheap motorbike that lets him take your job. Everything's relative.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/
:)
Techpowerup posted one too.
yup, its just them trying to save bandwidth or some nonsense by making sure half the readers stop reading after the 1st page. its just too much goddamned trouble to click on the rest. frankly sites that do this loose my respect. they are sh*tting on my experience for no good reason.
iirc, didn't one of the video card companies the thing with cards alternating on rendering frames? didnt they call it sli back then also except it stood for something else and that was the only way it speed things up (alternating frames)?
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/
A similar review on techpowerup.
I think most consumer multi-card solutions have relied on dividing the workload for single frames... But there was ATI's Rage Fury MAXX of course, which sported two chips that did alternate frames.
That would be the, now defunct, 3dfx and their Voodoo2 cards (I still have my 12 meg sitting in a box at home somewhere). Their SLI referred to ScanLine Interleave, which, I guess, could be considered a form of AFR. One card drew all the even lines on the screen, the other drew all the odd lines, and you got a pretty sweet performance bonus.
3dfx went bust a number of years ago and nVidia bought up all the leftovers, presumably taking 3dfx's sli tech and developing from there.
i'm wetting my pants just by thinking about it
This post is displayed with recycled electrons
The new megahurtz madnes. How many CPUs/GPUs do you have? Ohhh.. that is so yesterday.
To bad they don't come back in style in 10 years.
ya, thats the one I was thinking of...
Around here, it's easy to "rent/buy yourself to death", with a too expensive apartment/house. Then you sit there, don't go out, don't make any big purchases, you make the rent but live a sparse, plain and boring life.
...and buying 4 $400 graphics cards makes you Hugh Hefner?
Reading the comments above made me realize that a lot of people don't understand what NVIDIA has done here. Let me point out a few things for you:
* This is not hardware for the mass market. In fact, even the dual SLI setup is overkill and mainly used as "we knew how to do it and so we did it to prove it".
* This system is not supposed to be cheap and most definitely not intended to be the most effective cost per fps solution.
* Although only a few will buy this, it is far more valuable for NVIDIA to kill ATI:s chances of de-throning them from the performance top.
* Such excessive memory bandwidth is suitable for extreme resolutions that are currently unsupported by over 95 percent of the monitors, but the point is not that we should play our games at these levels, but to prove that it is possible.
* NVIDIA gets an edge over ATI along game developers because, performance-wise, they will be able to run the future games on setups comparable to single cards that are two or even three generations away.
* Yes, it's a waste of electricity, but if you're a member of Green Peace, then wait a few more generations before you buy a cow approved graphics card that fits into this category.
* One user was upset, claiming that it would be stupid to waste $1000 on a setup like this. I agree, but if you happen to drive a Ferrari and if you are debt free and got a few million bucks stored, then why not settle for the best if you can afford it? And you can obviously get your 17-year-old Slashdot-reading neighbour to put in watercooling or whatever to make it silent, too. Point is, some people will buy this, and being able to afford something isn't being stupid.
Last but not least, we should all remember that the CPU is the new bottleneck now. It will be interesting to see what a CPU a year from now can do to this rig.
Full Tilt
I have a pair of 12MB Voodoo 2s somewhere too. The Voodoo 5500 had dual processors making it SLI on one board. The 6000 was to have 4 processors but never made it to market because of an AGP bug and the fact that NVIDIA single GPU cards (GeForce 2) were getting as fast or faster than 3dfx's SLI setups.
Cthulhu Saves.
Can I get Octa-SLI with four of those cards on this Motherboard?
Life is not for the lazy.
I remember when I got suckered into buying 2 voodoo cards placed into my PC in SLI mode.
:- effects...
the demo disc that came with it showed off -: DAZZLING
and _NONE_ of the fucking games I owned or subsequently bought got any significant benefit from it...
hmmmmm...
No wonder people are buying consoles - they are tired of being milked!
And the Award for the Most Incomprehenible Slashdot article this week goes to...!
So $1000 gets you cards to throw in the bin once Vista comes out , by that time you'll be wanting octo 8800GTX SLI 1GB cards ...
To those that say this will be obsolete in a year.. NONSENSE!! It'll never be obsolete! This is finally so fast that this will be THE LAST PIECE OF COMPUTER HARDWARE EVER TO BUY! It can only appreciate in value.
I'm investing in 10.
All those predictors judging this new hardware from prvious countless years of industry/market behavior judging from thousands of computer products.. they're all wrong. ROFL @ them..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Guy I know goes nuts like this, has SLI'd Geforce 7800s and such, way overkill. He's a Lieutenant in the US Army (not in Iraq). The military basically covers all his expenses, so he's got money to throw around and this is what he chooses to throw it at.
Then of course there are people that just make tons of money. Another friend makes over $200,000 per year and, while he doesn't buy things like this, he does drop the same kind of money on silly gadgets. For example a PIX 515 to guard his home network. Necessary? No, a 501 would work just as well (all he really needs is their VPN, he's a Cisco Engineer) but he likes it, and can afford it.
That said, the market isn't huge, but then it doesn't have to be at those prices, espically since it's using chips that are found in lesser costing (and thus more widely produced) cards.
Pick a price you are willing and able to afford once per year, and buy there. You are generally better off getting a lesser card more often than a great card once and a while. So set a range for yourself and then upgrade about once per year. For gamers, I recommend shooting for the $150-200 range if possible. Get a card like that once per year, and you'll find all games will run fine, even near the end of that cycle. Don't give in to the temptation to get a more expensive card thinking it'll be good for longer, it really won't. In additon to gaining a lot of speed, graphics cards get new features all the time. A more frequent upgrade cycle is the way to go.
Whats the point really? 4 separate graphics cards in 1 PC case? I have 1 7900GT and that loud enough, I wouldnt want to hear 4 of them at once! Realistically, its all aimed at the high end user market who would are more likely to purchace high end QuadroFX cards. I hope I dont see this on the consumer market any time soon, I would just feel compelled to upgrade again. I do believe that there is no need to force this technology onto the gaming scene, game developers arent making use of the dual core CPU benefits. CPU's are still the bottleneck of the gaming world at the moment. You will see a FPS limit on benchmarks purely because of CPU limitations. More 3d Mark Wank scores sure but who cares about them :P
Why spend all this time and money investing in 4 single core cards in SLI, a 3 year old technology? Why not put some time into developing more robust and scalable applications for video cards, more to what crossfire is all about. I would lean towards a dual core GPU card rather than 2 or 4 cards in SLI. Think about all the savings in power and heat.
So this ,for now, is a case of 2 in the hand is better than 4 in the bush lab. I really see a hard time for 4 graphics card to even become HI end Geekdom computers. Especally when we have barely even touched the capability with 2 graphic cards. The creators of the games are barely messing with SLI/Crossfire let alone quad. This is way to over the edge... Look at SLI when it first came out around what... 2000 and is just now being accepted? Put it back in storage Nvidia and give us the public about 5 years before we even think about wanting quad core. :\
of this endless upgrade path. I sold gaming rig and bought a cheapie Dell 8100. 256mb or ram and geforce MX is all I should need. But I got this itch to play COD again. Hmmm, If that system had 1 gb of ram and geforce ti4200, it could run COD pretty well. Ah, but that CPU is the weak link then. Maybe I got a socket 423 to 478 adapter and a P4 2.8 ghz cpu......
But
a) its not going to make you a better gamer.
b) Your system isn't going to start running uber fast.
c) The only thing you are going to get out of it is bragging rights.
Don't waste your money.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
What's scary is that the sliders and setting in-game for oblivion don't let you set the highest/most agressive settings the game is capable of. You have to edit the config file for that, though you'll be lucky to get 5fps if you do set them all the way up.
Also oblivion favors ati cards so crossfire would be a better option than sli in this case.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea