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."

Comments

HTIALOA

[yogikoudou]

Hell That Is A Lot Of Acronyms

Unlike CPU, dual GPU costs double

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

Re:Unlike CPU, dual GPU costs double

[masklinn]

Reason may be that dual-GPUs are not dual core but two GPUs (usually) on two different PCB?

In a word, they're merely sticking two full graphic cards together, while dual-core CPUs stick the cores and the dual-CPU handling logic in a single physical package.

Dual GPU is twice as expensive to buy because it's twice as expensive to make in the first place.

X-bit found a tit on that one, no?

[DrunkenTerror]

Twenty-seven pages? Gimme a fucking break. Think they're milking it a touch?

Re:X-bit found a tit on that one, no?

[suv4x4]

Twenty-seven pages? Gimme a fucking break. Think they're milking it a touch?

They are, and this is why when I see an article with more than 3 pages I just click the last page for the conclusions by habit.

I don't know why the editors think their readers can be arsed to click for a new page after each word, because it definitely doesn't work.

When two is not enough...

[andytrevino]

Fuck Everything, We're Doing FOUR Graphics Cards

Re:When two is not enough...

[Bogtha]

From the Onion article, February 2004:

Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your mouth, baby birds, cause Mama's about to drop you one sweet, fat nightcrawler. Here she comes: Put another aloe strip on that fucker, too. That's right. Five blades, two strips, and make the second one lather. You heard me--the second strip lathers. It's a whole new way to think about shaving. Don't question it. Don't say a word. Just key the music, and call the chorus girls, because we're on the edge--the razor's edge--and I feel like dancing.

From CNN, September 2005:

Gillette has escalated the razor wars yet again, unveiling a new line of razors on Wednesday with five blades and a lubricating strip on both the front and back.

Old news...

[suv4x4]

Who cares about quad SLI, gimme the octet SLI, I just sold my house and I'm ready to buy one.

Re:Old news...

[Firehed]

Just don't throw a chair at him, Steve.

I wonder

[masterpenguin]

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.

Re:I wonder

[Kjella]

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

That's one of the phases. But there's another phase in which you find that there's a lot easier to free up money than to free up time. Or to put it in other words, that you'd rather pay to have real fun than to spend time having sorta fun on the cheap. I had a machine (AMD2000+) that became unstable. Tried RAM tests, CPU burn, 3Dmark loops, disk scans & defrags, voodoo and exorcism to no use, nothing revealed an actual problem except practical use.

I bought myself a new machine and retired it to one of the world's most overpowered home file servers. Why? Because I'd literally wasted *days* of my spare time, annoyance and grief over surprise reboots. I was so pissed I considered getting a Mac, but the x86 Macs weren't out yet. Why? "Just works(tm)". That kind of time I'd been wasting myself far more than covered the distance if I put any reasonable "price" on it.

Another thing I don't do is seriously price chase. I find a serious online retailer (either one I know previously, or one with a good customer base and rep), and as long as their prices aren't really out of whack (looking at 2-3 serious shops, I'm usually within 5% of those I know cut corners on stock, service and support) I buy it. Before I'd checking for various special offers and calculating if the postage still made it preferable to buy from different suppliers etc., try out various semi-serious sites with attractive prices etc.

To bring this back to Oblivion... I find it a very good game playing at half-res (960x600) on my 1920x1200 24" LCD monitor. I've tried it at 1920x1200 just to see what it looks like, and I don't feel it makes that much of a difference. That, and that I like my XPC that doesn't require a huge case and doesn't sound like an airplane taking off, which I imagine this will. But if I seriously felt "I need a quad-SLI to play this in 1920x1200 to really enjoy this game", I wouldn't really have a problem doing that.

Compared to the number of hours I've spent (and would spend with future games, presumably it'd last a little while) it wouldn't be unreasonable. Just like this LCD is way overkill if you want to put it like "Do you really need more than a mainstream 19" LCD?" the answer is no. But well, then I'd have a slightly bigger number in an account statement somewhere. I don't mean the cash is burning in my pocket. But if FPS games is what you do for fun, it's not an unreasonably expensive hobby compared to many others.

I know one who spent $3000 on a piano, one that spent $3000 on an HD camcorder, someone that likes to tune up his car for God knows what. All for their personal hobby, because that's what they do in their spare time, and they want their spare time to be fun. You need to have some disposable income to do that. 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. You choose what makes you happy.

Re:I wonder

[Aladrin]

A lot of people don't get this concept. But it really DOES happen. I constantly have NO free time. I've even considered moving closer to work and spending hundreds of dollars a month extra to save a 1.5 hour daily drive. 7.5 hours a week doesn't sound like much, until you find yourself avoiding going to the grocery store for as long as possible because you simply don't have time.

I'm playing off my student loans at about 6x the minimum payments. Money is definitely not the issue. Just time.

Likewise, where I used to play every game that came out, now I only hand-pick the very best ones and I get seriously ticked if any are crap and waste my time. It's quite a marked change from the boy who always said 'I'm bored.' to the person I am today.

very cool and all, but

[Prophetic_Truth]

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

Printer Friendly

[TubeSteak]

At least the good folks at Xbit Labs have a printer friendly link.

http://www.xbitlabs.com.nyud.net:8090/articles/vid eo/print/geforce7900-quad-sli.html

Probably good to have a Coralized link anyways, their site was slowing down for me.

What resolution?

[DarthChris]

FTFS (emphasis added):

"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."

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.

Re:What resolution?

[null-sRc]

Who actually has a monitor capable of such a high resolution?

*raises hand*

and so does anyhow who bought the 3007wfp on sale during recent dell days... Oblivion at native res is only about 30fps... would prefer to quad it up for a decent 100+ fps

Re:What resolution?

[Surt]

2560x1600 is a nice resolution to use with the cinema display, or with the dell 3007.
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/ global/products/monitors/topics/en/monitor_3007wfp ?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~section=specs
It's not too expensive a monitor, popular with gamers who have the kind of money to buy quad sli.

Re:Yeah, that all *SOUNDS* very impressive...

[m50d]

Erm, wtf? The driver shipped with the card plugs it into opengl and directx, the game outputs to those and doesn't care, and everything is happy.

Re:What's the freakin' point?

[pnaro]

So he can run Aero when Vista ships?

People, people, people

[eebra82]

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.