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.

Comments

Rediculous

[The_Pariah]

And this caters to less than 1% of the PC gamer market?

Re:Rediculous

[oskard]

Doesn't matter, nVidia needs to showcase that they're at the forefront of GPU technology. Its a type of advertisement, word of mouth stuff. Consumers that hear about this will automatically link the best video cards to nVidia's product line.

Re:Rediculous

[KingMotley]

Oh well. I'm in that 1%, so it's useful to me. Dell alone is selling some 4000 240xFPW monitors a week, that alone comes pretty close to 1% of the total PCs sold. That doesn't include the 30" that dell and apple sell, nor any other 1920x1200 resolution monitors from other manufacturers.

But ok, let's just assume it's 1% of the market. I don't know of any major company that wouldn't be willing to dedicate a couple programmers (if that) for a few weeks to possibly increase their sales by 1% (probably MUCH more with the PR of being known as the fastest/best).

Re:Rediculous

[TubeSteak]

Consumers that hear about this will automatically link the best video cards to nVidia's product line.

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.

Re:Rediculous

[Jerry Coffin]

The question is though (having not RTFA yet): will this work on Linux, and what boards offer four PCI-E x16 slots?

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.

Re:Rediculous

[Hoi Polloi]

You left out the cost of air conditioning your room after you put 4 of these space heaters in it.

Re:Rediculous

[rtaylor]

And this caters to less than 1% of the PC gamer market?
Exactly. The triple cheeseburger at your local burger joint is the same way and exists for the exact same reason.

If a $1200 product is available, people can feel good about the money they saved by purchasing the $600 product and laugh at the people wasting their money on the bigger item.

If the $600 product is the top of the line then less people will buy it, they'll get the $300 item instead.

Re:Rediculous

[Ramjet350]

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.

Re:I'd stab someone

[Random Destruction]

Yes it does. It's much easier to take their shit after stabbing them.

Re:I'd stab someone

[Matthaeus]

So you'd also go out and start punching people who have really nice home theatre systems? After all, spending that kind of dough to watch movies is sorta asking for it too.

I've got no problem with the early adopter crowd...they make things cheaper for the rest of us. If someone has that kind of disposable income, hey! More power to 'em!

(My sincere apologies if you were joking and I missed it.)

Re:I'd stab someone

[brunokummel]

That depends on what you consider investment
you could get some money out of it renting it for parties perhaps, opening a LAN-House, or even better you could build a hyper-resolution arcade with it and resell it with profit!

It all depends on how much you see opportunity where others see entertainment....

But can it run

[Timesprout]

Tetris at decent FPS?

Re:I'd stab someone

[sanborn's man]

Stop punching and think this kind of people do a great service to us. If those "punters" doesn't exist, surely the most powerful card you could buy today will be a S3 Virge 3D. Companies go ahead with new innovations because they know there will be always people spending insane amounts of money just to have the "greatest" and the "latest". Or you really think companies will develop a product as fast knowing they couldn't market it until it could be affordable to the mainstream? So don't punch them and think instead they are subsiding your next great video card ;-)

And the server...

[konigstein]

Died about 2 pages into the article, 1 minute after its /. debute... oh well. A new record perhaps?

From what I've read so far however, unless you have a big screen HDTV that you game with that supports high resolutions with a fast response time and refresh rate(1% of the gaming market), you WILL NOT need the ultra expensive quad SLI.

I sold my wife and car, and I get my quad sli setup when it arrives in the mail tomorrow.

Re:And the server...

[fanblade]

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.

Other markets

[everphilski]

... like people doing scene generation, rendering, etc. Small biz and hobbyist type work.

Umm 91.45 Got Released Today

[NiZm0]

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

Re:Umm 91.45 Got Released Today

[prisoner-of-enigma]

33MB? Ouch, are all the Windows drivers that bloated?

Remember, this is a "Unified Driver." That means it has drivers for a huge variety of video cards in one big, tidy package. I also most likely includes stuff for multiple languages, only one of which you'll actually use. Also, with the 9x.xx release of nVidia drivers you get both the "new" display driver interface (based on a web browser motif) and the "classic" interface (what we all know and have loved for the last five years or more).

Add all that up and you get a 33MB installer. The actual driver code, however, is far smaller. Not all of that 33MB ends up on your hard drive after the install is done. It's not bloated, it's just aimed at a very wide array of possible applications, and nVidia wants to put all that in one installer to simplify things for the end user. Bloat implies there's a lot of cruft in there, and that's not the case.

RE: I sold my wife and car...

[SPQR_Julian]

You sold your wife? Lucky man. Hell, I couldn't give mine away.

Re:I'd stab someone

[andrewman327]

I think it is just asking for a new best friend. Come on now, those people will a true friend, someone to tell him he's great. Someone to rub lotion on him. Someone he can hurl whiskey bottles at when he's feeling low!
Props to anyone who can place the quote without Googleing.

Only on /.

[HexaDex]

will you find an article on Quad SLI gaming rigs, following close on the heels of an article on gaming addiction in World of Warcraft. Kinda like advertising bigger hypodermics at a methadone clinic...

Re:Doing It All

[vostok4]

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.

Coral Cache mirror...

[markild]

When will they learn..

http://www.hothardware.com.nyud.net:8080/printarti cle.aspx?articleid=856

I'm still giggling about the fact that they called their site "hothardware".. It doesn't get any hotter than this! :P

Not particularly useful against a lower resolution

[mobby_6kl]

Most of the comments thus far are replies to some jealous asshole, so I'll try to steer this back on topic.

It's been possible to do for a while now, although it required some effort. From the benchmarks I've seen, QuadSLI is almost counterproductive for resolutions at or below 1600x1200. It does have a reasonable advantage in FEAR, but most other games showed very little improvement. That review didn't cover the 1920 and 2560 resolutions, but that's where the advantage should be quite significant. Of course, whether it's worth it or not depends on how many more hours you'll have to spend flipping burgers to pay it off.

Re:Doing It All

[Henry V .009]

Who owns the 3dfx code?

New hardware

[JustNiz]

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).

Re:Doing It All

[mickwd]

"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).

that's dope

[fearanddread]

Who cares if it's complete overkill. Overkill is good kill.

Re:Doing It All

[BigDumbAnimal]

You said 3dfx, but you meant SGI. How would 3dfx code hurt them? They own all of 3dfx's assets.

Pointless

[AC-x]

Everyone knows the main bottleneck in a modern gaming PC is the network card, not the graphics card!

Re:Pointless

[JustNiz]

To totally alleviate CPU usage and ethernet bottlenecks I advise using RS-232 instead. The other benefits are that you can connect to that new-fangled Compuserve BBS service if you also have an acoustic coupler. You can also save on cabling costs by using damp string.

Niz 123342,9987

Re: I sold my wife and car...

[JustNiz]

Yeah I have a serious compatability issue between my wife and new PC hardware. She's AGP (a grouchy person).

Re:Doing It All

[kimvette]

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.

Bull----. If they "acquired" 3DFX property, they OWN it. If they OWN the "IP" then there is NO legal issue blocking them from opening up the source.

However, if it is "licensed" (-sic), then they ought to set up a second engineering team, give them notes on the architecture (but include no reference to any of the "licensed" code), then have them reengineer the drivers from scratch. There you have it, now legally clean drivers they own outright and can "legally" GPL.

Re:Doing It All

[Chirs]

Contrary to vostok4's statement, it's not the 3dfx stuff that's the issue but rather the algorithms/code/etc. that was licensed from SGI.

As to the binary blob plus wrapper code comment, that's exactly what they have now. They could conceivably move more code out of the binary blob, but they probably don't see much benefit coming from that as the number of free software users that also need high performance 3D is fairly small.

It's nice how you make and break the argument

[drachenstern]

Why blow money on an outdated (and yet current offering?) SGI workstation when you can get better performance out of a quad-(dual core) (8-way processing) PC?

The question is though: will this work on Linux, and what boards offer four PCI-E x16 slots?

It's tremendously important to both note and keep in mind that the reason why any individual would purchase an SGI system is two-fold.

One, your department already runs SGI? Or the application that you want to run runs on IRIX (ya, so they support a linux kernel ...).

Two, you know the hardware is going to work with the operating system and vice versa out of the box. The same reason why you would tell a family member to purchase a laptop/notebook/ultraportable from Dell/HP/Gateway/Lenovo/Whomever, so you don't have to support it for everything.

Now, my question is this, does the quad-pci board allow you to run two sets of duo-sli cards instead of one quad-sli or one duo-sli? Any graphics gurus?

Latency: Serious Gamer Issue with AFR

[adisakp]

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.

Tangental? OT?

[Morosoph]

Hang on, this is certainly on-topic, or else the topic is absurdly narrow.

nVidia are promoting a DIY hardware hack, billed in those terms. Hacking is what we, as geeks, most want to do, or else know that others are doing so that we can extend a devices functionality, reliability, or freedom of use. The immediately larger context is that this is Slashdot; this is what the site's about.

Aside from that, you gave no compelling reason for Nvidia to do as you wish.

Now that is (marginally) flamebait. Producing free software isn't sufficient reason?

I'd say it's because it was a negative comment

Here we agree, political correctness is beginning to be applied to corporations; this goes beyond the standard of hurting someone's feelings...

Re:I'd stab someone

[WebWeasel2006]

Sad sad loser me. The simpsons... Lisa to bart.... Radioactive man film episode, talking about Millhouse.