• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

SLI - double the memory?

MrMonkeh

MrMonkeh

MrMonkeh

Associate
Joined
29 Sep 2005
Posts
39
Hey guys,

Does SLI does your video memory? eg: if i had 2x 8800gts's with 320mb, will i have 640 or 320mb?

Also, there are a few sli options you can tweak in the nvidia control panel - do any of the non default options improve performance?

I wanted to search for these questions but I cant find the forum search function!!?? :)

Monkeh
 
Nope, just operates at the lowest memory so in that case 320MB.

If you put a 640mb GTS and a 320mb GTS in SLi it would also go to the lowest memory available and be 320mb! kinda sucks but thems the breaks
 
Each card uses its own 320mb memory (for example). It is not pooled together and used as a large resource. (At least to date, I have nothing suggesting that it happens).

So basically, if a game is using 400mb of graphics memory, your better off getting 2x 640mb gts cards, as the 320's in sli will have to keep swapping out the textures (performance will suffer).

Matthew
 
Basically each card has to still keep the entire scene loaded in order to render its half. That means that if the scene takes up 400mb like said above both cards have to have that full 400mb on their own memory resulting in a total graphics memory usage of 800mb. Sucksies..

An efficient system would split the objects in the scene up in order of resource usage and hand half to one card and half to the other and let them render only the objects each has. Probably not the most efficient however when it comes to reflecting an object on the other card and such.

The most efficient way of dual GPU performance is for them both to use the same memory. That won't be possible with current architecture until we see multi core GPUs on a single card with a single memory configuration. The PCI-E lane between the two SLI cards is just too slow to pass needed data back and forward at the moment so they keep all the data on each card seperately.
 
Search has been disabled as it breaks the forums, but they are broken anyway so theres no difference. :)

Yeah its pointless going SLi with 2x 320mb GTS's as you'll still only have 320mb, so will be useless when Dx10 games get here that use bigger textures thus, requiring more Ram.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom