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

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.

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.

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.

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.