HOLY CRAP!! NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI-E.........S L I!!!!!!!!

[NFS4]

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1728/

 

[JetBlack69]

Wow, now I can take up 4 slots for 2 cards!!!!!

 

[merlocka]

Holy Crap is right.

 

[Acanthus]

hey if youve got the cash, thats some serious power

 

[fishsgood]

drool...i wonder if ati will also support dual graphics cards.

 

[Aquaman]

WTFWATERMELON:Q

Cheers,
Aquaman

 

[Insane3D]

WTFBBQSALAMANDERMOUNTAINS!!

 

[Adul]

OMG!!! OH NO! AIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! NOOOOOO!O!OO!O!!!

 

[Aquaman]

Originally posted by: Adul
OMG!!! OH NO! AIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! NOOOOOO!O!OO!O!!!

That's sooooooooooo 20th century

Cheers,
Aquaman

 

[Pariah]

Looks like NVidia just gave a swift kick to the teeth of Alienware. Who's going to buy their horribly overpriced rig now? Not that people were lining up before...

Would be nice if this technology was brought to the midrange and lower cards. Again, I don't really see the need for using 2 Ultras to drive one screen even if you have a highend 21/22" display. Seems like extraordinary overkill. But, if they can adapt this technology so that it can be used with multimonitor gaming, where each card is dedicated to a single display, then this technology suddenly becomes very interesting. The midrange class of cards with this next generation are plenty fast for 1280+ gaming. Running dual monitors at almost the speed of traditional single display gaming for simulations and FPS's games would be a great leap in the experience that we haven't seen in quite a while.

 

[clicknext]

Wonder how many PCI-E slots computers will have... if it's 5 like PCI, a lot of people may not be able to run this configuration... but then again, not many will do it anyway.

 

[Xernex]

R.I.P Alienware. DOA with their product.

Now someone bring on the 939 Nforce 3 mobos with dual pci-e 16x slots....NOW!!

 

[CrackRabbit]

so when do the dual PCI-E 16x Athlon 64 mobos come out ? *droooolll......*
<---- had a set of SLI Voodoo 2s back in the day


CrackRabbit

 

[Anand Lal Shimpi]

The NDA doesn't lift until 2PM EST, which is when you'll see our piece on the technology. For now I'll say this:

NVIDIA's "SLI" isn't the same as 3dfx's "SLI" (they stand for two different things). NVIDIA's implementation is actually a bit better for performance and quality than the old V2 SLI. The biggest limitation to NVIDIA's SLI are the chipset/motherboard requirements. Can anyone name a chipset with two PCI Express x16 links? NVIDIA's workaround is interesting, but still has fairly high requirements...

Confused? Wait till 2PM

Take care,
Anand

 

[rbV5]

:Q

 

[THUGSROOK]

Originally posted by: merlocka
Holy Crap is right.

 

[augiem]

My god, imagine the power supply you need for that thing... And the heat?

I knew Nvidia or Ati would do their own SLI once Alienware announced their graphics array. Let the competition begin!! B) As it stands, Alienware has a couple of big ups on Nvidia though -- connecing any two cards together and the plan for 4x and even 8x configurations. .... NOW I know what to do with all those old video cards I've got lying around!! Farcry on 8x Riva 128 ROCKS!!!!

A

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Looks like NVidia just gave a swift kick to the teeth of Alienware. Who's going to buy their horribly overpriced rig now? Not that people were lining up before...

I thought that AlienWare took out some patents on the tech, or was in the process of doing so? Could be an interesting battle shaping up.

Obviously, as the main provider of drivers, NVidia probably has a leg up on AW in the software-engineering dept. After all, NV drivers now already include a feature ("stereo driver"), that works similary to MetaByte's stereoscopic shim driver.

I somehow smell a cross-licensing agreement brewing.. AW gets NV's driver tech/support, NV gets a license to AW's/MB's patents (assuming that there are, or will be, anyways).

Quote from article:

Exact performance figures are not yet available, but Nvidia's SLI concept has already been shown behind closed doors by one of the companies working with Nvidia on the SLI implementation. On early driver revisions which only offered non-optimized dynamic load-balancing algorithms their SLI configuration performed 77% faster than a single graphics card.

Ok, so NV *are* partnering with AW on this, they aren't working on seperate implementations. I guess AW chose to spill the beans slightly early, perhaps to dump some quantity of FUD into the marketplace that AW would be the only one to have this kind of tech. And if they are partnering, then I guess the question of patents is probably a moot point then. I hope that this solution is generally-available from nearly all of the OEM NV-card vendors.

Originally posted by: Pariah
But, if they can adapt this technology so that it can be used with multimonitor gaming, where each card is dedicated to a single display, then this technology suddenly becomes very interesting. The midrange class of cards with this next generation are plenty fast for 1280+ gaming. Running dual monitors at almost the speed of traditional single display gaming for simulations and FPS's games would be a great leap in the experience that we haven't seen in quite a while.

Heck yeah! This would be like Maxtrox's attempt at "surround gaming", only this time, done right by NV.

Btw, do you happen to know if any of these newer, modern, video cards support sync-on-green monitors? It seems that they generally support composite sync, so SOG support doesn't seem that much more of a stretch. I have pair of really nice older DEC workstation monitors, Trinitron 19" tubes, but being as I have to hook them up to a pair of Matrox Mill. 1 cards for their undocumented SOG support, I can't use them for any sort of 3D-gaming. It would be INSANE to be able to use three 19" screens for a FPS.

 

[Dug]

Originally posted by: rbV5
:Q

:Q :Q

 

[BFG10K]

My god, imagine the power supply you need for that thing... And the heat?

Just what I was thinking.

 

[Ryoga]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: Pariah
Looks like NVidia just gave a swift kick to the teeth of Alienware. Who's going to buy their horribly overpriced rig now? Not that people were lining up before...

I thought that AlienWare took out some patents on the tech, or was in the process of doing so?

To my knowledge, they are. But AW isn't using SLI. AW's solution is to use one card to render the top half of the screen and a second card to render the bottom half. With SLI, one card renders every even line of pixels (a scan line) on the screen, and the second card renders every odd line of pixels. Hence the scan lines mesh together (interleave) to form a single image. SLI = Scan Line Interleave.

The effective results -- each card renders only half the screen -- are the same, but it's not clear what kind of performance difference there is between each method.

AW's setup is fundamentally limited in that it is software-based. nVidia can develop a hardware solution, which will always be faster than software.

in any case, I'm not sure that it matters yet. There are no mobo's I've seen that will have more than one 16x PCI-E video slot.

 

[DaFinn]

My god, imagine the power supply you need for that thing... And the heat?

AND THE NOISE... :Q

 

[Zebo]

Besides heat, premium cost, PSU, and general overkill it would be very difficult to put two waterblocks on there. Can you pull them apart w/o damage to install?

Pretty neat though.

 

[Pariah]

NVidia isn't using SLI either. The thread title and article it links to, incorrectly refers to NVidia's implementation as SLI when it is using the same split screen method that Alienware apparently is. How similar they are is still unknown, but I doubt there was much of a joint venture because Alienware's implementation is video card independent and uses a 3rd PCI card "hub" to interface the 2 video cards. NVidia's directly connects the 2 with no need for the 3rd card. Since Alienware has said there were no plans to sell the technology outside of their systems it's unlikely they did any work with NVidia considering they would have known long ago if NVidia was planning on using this technology if it was jointly developed.

Edit:

After reading Anand's post above, I guess NVidia is using SLI, but in this case SLI does not stand for scan line interleave. That's all we need is more acroymns that have multiple meanings to simplify our lives.

 

[KristopherKubicki]

Looks like NVidia just gave a swift kick to the teeth of Alienware.

I think more like NVIDIA was the technology behind what alienware was doing. But thats just me.

Kristopher