quad sli

[ergonomics]

hello

couple of things, firstly:

in an sli optmised game, would these beat say a gtx?
are there drivers out for quad sli on xp?
does my motherboard support it? (p5ne sli) the 7950gx2s are picky about mobo support and i cant find a list anywhere that says if my motherboard is compatible with these cards.

also, does anyone have a single gx2? how does it perform? thanks for any help lads

 

[mdjmcnally]

Wouldn't bother with Quad SLI, and I don't think there are stable drives out there anyway.

A single 7950GX2 wont compete with a single 8800GTX.

 

[truebluecfc]

Isnt it dual sli? just wondering ...

 

[Emlyn_Dewar]

Quad SLI, a comedy marketing gimmick with extremely poor support and pretty much rubbish results for every game.
An 8800GTX would laugh off the Quad SLI solution, in speed, stability and image quality. On the SLI optimised front they can edge ahead, slightly.

There's quad sli results against a GTX in the benchmarks in an xbitlabs article.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gf8800-games.html
That's early drivers aswell.

I remember a Dell launch where they had the quad system playing some less than amazing game, there were headlines and benchmarks galore afterwards. Not heard much of it now.

Edit: Inspired to read more, I wonder if they'll try again now that we've got some DX10 games surfacing. A few articles are saying it's limitations of DX9 that cause the less than impressive results.

 

[ergonomics]

yeah i wasnt really going to buy a quad sli solution, ive got gts sli anyway, and that can be..tiresome...at times, i just heard a few things about it. i know there are next to no drivers, and for a while i honestly thought there are NO certified drivers for it anyway.

 

[Rroff]

The problem with QUAD SLI isn't drivers, etc. the real problem is...

You either have to build and render 4 frames at a time - this is problematic for several reasons... which I won't go into as it gets a little complicated... and isn't used...

or as QUAD SLI normally works you have to employ both AFR and SFR modes to render the game frames... the first frame is split between 2 of the GPUs on one card and the next frame is split between the 2 GPUs on the other card...

Traditionally games either run well in either AFR or SFR mode not both hence why the 2 seperate modes exist... for QUAD SLI to work you need a game that works well with both modes and due to using SFR mode you will pretty much never get 4x the performance... SFR will typically get a performance gain of 1.2-1.6x that of a single card - so 2x that gives you a gain between 2.4x and 3.2x...

oh BTW I did play around with 2x 7950GX2 back along as I was able to borrow a second card for awhile and aside from 3D Marks 06 where I got a nice boost (15K) I was unable to get any gains at all in most games.

And lastly - theoretically in a DX9 game that wasn't overly shader heavy and maximised the capabilities of 2x 7950GX2 it would absolutely **** on a single 8800GTX with more than double the performance - in reality your not gonna see even close to that... except in 3d Marks 06 QUAD SLI is only similiar performance to a single 8800GTS.

 

[WJA96]

The P5N-E SLi doesn't support Quad-SLI due to insufficient PCIe bandwidth. It's carp anyway. Just get an 8800GTX - unless you have a thoroughly mental screen (30") with all the eye-candy on there isn't anything faster. And even then I'd tell you to upgrade the motherboard first as the dual 8x PCIe would be limiting SLi on that size display.