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TRI or Quad Sli

It's pointless, and for marketing uses only. Complete waste of money at this point in time, especially as currently the only NV cards that can do it are outdated, and outstripped by the 8800GTX.
 
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Pretty sure Tri SLI doesnt work.

Quad SLI can only be used with two 7950GX2 and Nvidia probaiblly havnt even released or updated any drivers since the card came out.

(might be something in the workstation area of PCs im not sure)
 
Tri SLI would be cool - but unsupported - nVidia have made rumours about it recently but I doubt it will see the light of day - especially as MS have said Vista "won't" support it...

Quad SLI will only ever bring the same gains as Tri SLI would in a best case situation anyway due to the method needed to make it work - that method unfortunatly doesn't work with most games and applications... I can post more info on this if you want - or you can search for my previous posts on the matter...

Tri SLI if ever released has some potential as you could maybe use it alongside triple buffering to build 3 frames at a time and if your framerate is high enough it would offset the inherent input lag... however in situations where Tri SLI was needed just to get a high enough framerate to be "playable" i.e. 25-30 then the input lag would probably be quite noticeable.
 
SLI will generally give far more than a 20% increase in performance... there are some games that it doesn't give huge gains in sure but the majority it works very well.
 
Correctly implemented quad can work extremely well allowing for much higher levels of AA and AF at larger resolutions - the problem is that in the enthusiast gaming market it's seldom well implemented. If you'd like to see how it's supposed to be done have a little read of THIS

I do like the look of the:

RenderBeast® visualization system with 64 parallel Radeon GPUs
Click to expand...

That's 64 parallel gpus (Only 9800s - but hey ;) ) capable of 384-sample anti-aliasing.:D Bye-bye jaggies!
 
I thought Quad-SLI was more limited by DX9 and some of it's inner workings that I flat out don't understand... Would be interesting to see if DX10 can sort it out.
 
Emlyn_Dewar said:
I thought Quad-SLI was more limited by DX9 and some of it's inner workings that I flat out don't understand... Would be interesting to see if DX10 can sort it out.
Click to expand...

IIRC from the reviews of when it released this is true. Something to do with how the cards render the scene.

However even if it did work you would need a monster CPU to feed the gpus.

I almost laughed when I read a guy on techpowerup is running 2 7950GX2's in SLI ( so quad sli) with a opteron 2.4ghz processor. :p
 
OK this isn't the whole story but the problem with QUAD SLI is the 2 methods of utilising all 4 cores...

Using each card to render a whole frame each you'd need a lot of CPU power, risk very noticeable input lag and often just don't have a 3rd or 4th frame to render...

If (as QUAD SLI normally does) you use both* AFR and SFR modes to render the game you need a game that works well with both SFR and AFR modes to get any real gains - much of the point that the 2 seperate SLI rendering methods exists is that most games only work well with one OR other method... not both... so the end story is most games won't take any advantage of QUAD SLI over normal SLI.


* in normal QUAD SLI each alternative game frame is split between 2 of those cores in SFR mode, while the other 2 cores will handle the next frame between them... as SFR mode pretty much never gets more than about 1.6x the performance of a single core the max best case performance for a QUAD SLI setup is around 3.2x and on average about 2.4x.
 
Oh and I forgot to add...

As mentioned above the only advantage to QUAD SLI (but hardly worth the money) you can do 32x SLI FSAA and still get great performance and it really does look nice - but hardly worth the money for the slight increase in visual quality over 4x FSAA.
 
Soooooo...why do they release motherboards with 3 pci-e x16 slots on them? Just makes no sense =P

And yes I'm aware there are RAID cards etc that use x16 slots ;)
 
So that people can run 2 cards in SLI for gaming and use the 3rd slot for another graphics card that drives another monitor (when using SLI you can only use 1 of the video out connections so you lose multi monitor capabilities on any cards using it)
 
If you read most are not full 16x speed, just actual size, Asus claim its 8x Electric (not 100% sure WTF this means), its to let you use other 16x size devices that may come out or a 3rd GPU for Physics use where it wont need 16x.

Striker E :

2 x PCI Express x16 slot, support NVIDIA® SLI™ technology, at full x16, x16 speed(blue)
1 x PCI Express x16, at x8 speed(middle)
1 x PCI Express x1
2 x PCI 2.2
 
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Do you use sli with your Ultra helm? i would have thought you would. I wondered how it performs in games. Id imagin your FPS would be in the hundreds constantly in every game. That said, why would you need more then 2 cards if you could get two ultras?
 
Nope I will never run 2 cards, no need for it its a con IMO, that why they wanted AGP dead and PCI-E out soo soon after AGP8x and the new AGP on the cards next.

I could run 2 in SLI at 16x and still have that full size 16x slot running 8x for Physics on a lesser card though.
 
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shame. I wondered how they fared. Doubt youd need to upgrade for a while. Then again not all games would run sli and therefore some games youd suffer in and others youd be flying.
 
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