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SLI On Life Support For the AMD Platform

Posted by Soulskill on from the two-for-the-price-of-two dept.

JoshMST writes "For years AMD and Nvidia were like peas and carrots, and their SNAP partnership proved to be quite successful for both companies. Things changed dramatically when AMD bought up ATI, and now it seems like Nvidia is pulling the plug on SLI support for the AMD platform. While the chipset division at AMD may be a bitter rival to Nvidia, the CPU guys there have had a long and prosperous relationship with the Green Machine. While declining chipset margins on the AMD side was attributed to AMD's lackluster processor offerings for the past several years, the Phenom II chips have reawakened interest in the platform and they have found a place in enthusiasts' hearts again. Unfortunately for Nvidia, they are seemingly missing out on a significant revenue stream by not offering new chipsets to go with these processors. They have also curtailed SLI adoption on the AMD platform as well, which couldn't be happening at a worse time."

2 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Re:amd by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 0, Troll

    A Phenom II system will cost roughly the same as an Intel Core 2 Duo system and be vastly worse in terms of performance. Nice try.

    --
    "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
  2. Re:Who CARES about SLI? by EdIII · · Score: 1, Troll

    The fact is that a very marginally small portion of people actually use more than one video card.

    You're wrong on that. There are plenty of people I know that have and use more than one video card. Not necessarily with SLI though...

    And why should anyone really, when modern day consoles cost about the same amount as one would spend on a moderately high end processor + video card, why the hell would most people want to spend an extra 300 bucks or so to have an extra video card at only 25% or less extra benefit in framerate?

    I'm running two video cards without SLI on one machine. The added frame rate by having the two cards work as one was not the point. It was having 4 monitors, which is pretty useful sometimes.

    AMD has the ability to tie in their own processor + GPU combo, plus let the consumer buy a separate GPU, thus getting their own "SLI"

    Pretty sure that SLI requires the two video cards to be actually connected. If you mean that AMD would put the GPU on the motherboard, I would still think you would need a SLI connector on that separate GPU actually connected.

    SLI is not just two video cards, it's two or more video cards connected with a SLI bridge cable.

    I can understand that SLI has always sounded like a super expensive way to get a little more performance, which may not be cost efficient or desirable. However, there are many valid uses for more than one video card in a system. Of course these days, most video cards have two DVI-D connectors which allow 2 monitors, but to get 3 or 4 you still need two video cards again.... :)

    Just keep in mind that multiple monitor support does not have a lot to do with gaming yet...