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4 x gpu's?

thorium

n00b
Joined
Nov 9, 2004
Messages
4
I just read the gigabyte 3D1 review and am I the only one to whom it occured that it might be possible to put 2 x (2 x 660 gpus) in one computer? :drools:
 
No the chipset does not support that, and the card does not have an SLI connector. might be possible in the future with multi-core and such.
 
no cause that mobo is onyl for its pci-express configuartion,and the normal pci express slots will not have an adapter I assume. I allready though of that
 
I think the real issue is Nvidia's drivers. They do not technically allow two cores on one card. Thus, the card makes the motherboard split the PCI Express channel into two 8x channels in one slot, half the slot for each core. The cores, though on the same pcb, actually communicate through the PCI Express interface like normal SLIed cards. Theoretically, if a design were introduced where all the data transfer between the cores actually occured on the video card pcb, the pci express/proprietary sli link could enable quad cores by linking two such cards. Unfortunately, Nvidia would need to cooperate.
 
also...as it stands now, a lot of games have to use AFR to work with SLI...if you added another dual core card...that'd be four gpus working in tandem...don't you think latency would start to become a very large issue?

personally I think this is the way it will go...but nvidia's driver team has their work cut out for them...
 
mr.fishie said:
if not practical it would make for a hella cool tech demo.

Well with enough work they can get everything working in SFR (right?) and then they could theoretically do as many gpus as they want...but I'm guessing the more gpus you added, the more overhead you'd have...so much beyond 4 gpus wouldn't really be helpful...unless you were doing something super high resolution...
 
4 gpus would be great. One could be dedicated to rendering water (my favorite aspect of current games), one for pixel shaders, and the other two for everything else.
 
^eMpTy^ said:
also...as it stands now, a lot of games have to use AFR to work with SLI...if you added another dual core card...that'd be four gpus working in tandem...don't you think latency would start to become a very large issue?

personally I think this is the way it will go...but nvidia's driver team has their work cut out for them...

I don't think latency would be much more of an issue than it is with current SLi implementations if two dual core (2 cores, single chip) cards were used to comprise the 4 GPU approach.
 
How much data actually has to be transfered between graphics cards in SLI? I'm guessing no a lot, the data is simply fed to them from the CPU and they render it in which case I think it'll still be possible to get very good results from 4 cards in parallel - when the technology is available. All there will be is additional CPU overhead for the splitting of the data between cards.
 
Well I bet the answer is more data than you think considering the workload assigned to one of the cards has to be sent to the card which is connected to the monitor and them summed with that cards output.
 
^eMpTy^ said:
Well with enough work they can get everything working in SFR (right?) and then they could theoretically do as many gpus as they want...but I'm guessing the more gpus you added, the more overhead you'd have...so much beyond 4 gpus wouldn't really be helpful...unless you were doing something super high resolution...

some games just don't work well with SFR and AFR is the only option

and vise versa

according to NVIDIA
 
Why would you want multi GPU on one card, it would only work when you are running multi games, same thing as dual CPU, such as dual Xeon won't have any performance increase as 1 64FX CPU or even a regular 64 CPU.
 
BloodRayne said:
Why would you want multi GPU on one card, it would only work when you are running multi games, same thing as dual CPU, such as dual Xeon won't have any performance increase as 1 64FX CPU or even a regular 64 CPU.
lol21.gif


Doesn't work that like dude...
 
Brent_Justice said:
some games just don't work well with SFR and AFR is the only option

and vise versa

according to NVIDIA

with older games yeah, but nvidia can get newer games (that would actually need the horsepower) to natively support the technology (i.e. unreal 3)
 
There would hardly be any performance increase with more then one core right now in even the latest games because one gpu alone is bottlenecked by the cpu.
 
Gavinni said:
There would hardly be any performance increase with more then one core right now in even the latest games because one gpu alone is bottlenecked by the cpu.

not always
 
SnakEyez187 said:
But wouldnt it be worse or no better then just putting 2 6800U's in SLI?

Like I mentioned before...the only reason you'd need 4 gpus is for seriously high resolution stuff...like playing above 1600x1200...
 
^eMpTy^ said:
Like I mentioned before...the only reason you'd need 4 gpus is for seriously high resolution stuff...like playing above 1600x1200...

not really

anything GPU intensive, like intensive shader use or OpenEXR HDR etc...

if its like a DX8 or DX7 level game, then yah, just resolution with AA and AF
 
thorium said:
I just read the gigabyte 3D1 review and am I the only one to whom it occured that it might be possible to put 2 x (2 x 660 gpus) in one computer? :drools:

No you're not the only one that occured to, but its not possible, b/c
# 1 there is not SLI connector
#2 the SLI connection is already being used on the actual card. (hardwired on the PCB with both GPU's)
#3 software/drivers would need to be re-written to split up tasks 4 ways.
 
robberbaron said:
4 gpus would be great. One could be dedicated to rendering water (my favorite aspect of current games), one for pixel shaders, and the other two for everything else.

doesnt quite work like that either.

if you split it up like that you'd have the same performance as a single card solution practically, lol

one card for pixel shaders... each card only has a certain amount of pixel shading power, so even if thats all it was doing it wouldnt be much more efficient.

You would need to split the scene up 4 ways SPR for best results. So each card would only be responsible for 1/4 the work. And with things split 4 ways you could probably just give them all a 25% cut, ie: at 1600x1200, each card gets an 800x600 chunk and that would probably be fine.
 
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