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NVIDIA Do-It-Yourself Quad SLI Launched
Spinnerbait writes "Today, NVIDIA will be releasing their Forceware v91.37 drivers and with them will be officially endorsing Do-It-Yourself Quad-SLI. HotHardware has put together an article detailing the steps necessary to assemble and configure a high-end Quad-SLI rig, and they give some thoughts regarding XHD Gaming and its associated costs. Those of you that are hell-bent on gaming ultra-high resolutions (1920X1200 or 2560X1600 for example), along with the highest available image quality, might want to give one of these setups a look." Before making a purchase I would recommend building that water-cooled credit card first.
Quad NVIDIA SLI Technology
Windows XP/2000
ForceWare Release 90
Version: 91.45
Release Date: August 9, 2006
Please make sure to read the Driver Installation Hints Document before you install this driver.
U.S. English
File Size: 32.8 MB
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_91.45.html
This has been addressed before. nVIDIA cannot open up the source to their drivers because of source code included from their 3DFX acquisition. They have stated time and time again, they would LOVE to open it up, but they legally cannot.
That is miles more than ATI have provided for Linux. Hopefully when the NDA on the contract runs out we will see open drivers actively supported from nVIDIA.
When will they learn..
i cle.aspx?articleid=856
:P
http://www.hothardware.com.nyud.net:8080/printart
I'm still giggling about the fact that they called their site "hothardware".. It doesn't get any hotter than this!
Scully: Should we arrest David Copperfield?
Mulder: Yes we should, but not for this.
It seems crazy to be investing more than $1k in new videocards at this point in time, as nothing out currently is DirectX 10 (full windows vista) compatable. The new nVidia cards that are will be out in less than a month or so (if you believe the press).
"That is miles more than ATI have provided for Linux."
ATI may not be brilliant, but at least they're putting some sort of effort behind their Linux drivers now.
They actually support XOrg 7.1 now, whereas nVidia don't yet (officially).
It's called the halo effect and is the tendency for positive or negative perceptions to spill over from one product to another.
Halo products usually cost an arm and a leg too.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I can't say one way or the other about Linux (yet). You don't need four PCI-E x16 slots though. This is based around the nVidia 7950 GX2, which connects two graphics processors to the motherboard via a single PCI-E slot. Each of those takes up two slots worth of space (in fact,it's two boards connected together) but the high-end single-GPU boards (e.g. 7900GTX, ATI X1900) do so as well. Most SLI motherboards leave quite a bit of room between their x16 slots, so the physical installation should rarely (if ever) cause a problem.
In case anybody cares: apparently during development, they did build a few dual-GPU boards that required two slots -- but they were never put into real production.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
They were able to get 78.9 FPS with Prey but only with 4-way full AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering). There is a big issue with serious gamers and this configuration.
On 4-way AFR the driver builds a display list and sends it to a GPU that isn't busy. It is possible to have all four GPUs busy (rendering frames) while the current frame is being displayed and a new display list is being generated by the CPU. This means what you see with 4-way full AFR can be up to 5 frames later than what is going on in the game engine. At 78.9 FPS, this can translate into nearly 64 ms of latency which is enough to get you killed if you're a serious gamer.
Serious gamers with Quad-SLI are going to want to use SFR (Split Frame Rendering) which cuts latency quite a bit but takes a performance hit to the FPS. There are definite inefficiencies to 4-way SFR with having all four cards render portions of the same scene vs 4-way AFR. You generate 4 times as much display list info (GPU fifo data) and you have to replicate more data and uploads (if textures don't fit into the 512MB memory) across the GPUs.
I'm not sure if the Quad-SLI supports an AFR/SFR hybrid where you can have 2X2 (2 GPUs working on SFR each in AFR queue) - this might balance the performance vs latency issue better.
If you read the specs of the Mac Pro - it has 4 x16 physical slots but it only supports 1 x16, 1 x8, 2 x4's lanewise. It is not 4 full x16 lanes of bandwidth according to the specs.
Sad sad loser me. The simpsons... Lisa to bart.... Radioactive man film episode, talking about Millhouse.
Sometimes I get lost inside my head....
When it comes to video cards, size does not matter :-)
Contrary to what you might think, HDTVs actually have pretty low resolutions and refresh rates when compared to regular old desktop CRTs. If you're trying to make a ridiculous case for someone that would need this, say they have a high res CRT.