ATI MVP: SLI in serious trouble?

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^eMpTy^ said:
I'm sorry...are you making fun of yourself here? otherwise I don't understand what you mean.

I gave you my argument...and you called me a !!!!!! and there was something about cookies.

If you disagree then say something instead of just pointing the !!!!!! finger...that doesn't help anything...
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You have to agree empty, you ARE a fan boy, you automatically disagree with any praise/support for ATI, and go out of your way to make people not buy ATI cards. Cant you realise that theres no point to having blind fan-boyness, Im excited for AMR and The R520, Im equally excited about the G70, I merely talk about the R520 alot, because I know more about it (via rumors and such) however, you seem to think that if someone is excited about a certain product, they have a blind loyalty towards that company. So please listen, Im not saying anything bad about Nvidia, SLI, the 6 series or whatever, Im just excited abouut the R520, as well as AMR and the G70, because I like to get excited about new products coming up on the market, and I enoy talking about them (even if all there is to talk about, is rumors)

If you take such a great offence at that, then put me on your ignore list.
 
Let's hope that AMR gives the power of 2 cards.....instead of the varying degrees that SLi give.

Yes it's fun to speculate, but saying one is wrong and one is right when we only know what one side does is a little pointless. Hopefully numbers will be out soon and then the real fun begins ;)
 
Steel Chicken said:
..stuff..
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Ah right, you just saw the word "God" and saw red, I get ya know.

I'll concede that that was an unecessarily emotive choice of wording.

If I swapped that for "...in a superior position..." would you accept the rest of the stuff as valid?

Because it is you know.

*spambrake initialised*
 
Hate_Bot said:
You have to agree empty, you ARE a fan boy, you automatically disagree with any praise/support for ATI, and go out of your way to make people not buy ATI cards. Cant you realise that theres no point to having blind fan-boyness, Im excited for AMR and The R520, Im equally excited about the G70, I merely talk about the R520 alot, because I know more about it (via rumors and such) however, you seem to think that if someone is excited about a certain product, they have a blind loyalty towards that company. So please listen, Im not saying anything bad about Nvidia, SLI, the 6 series or whatever, Im just excited abouut the R520, as well as AMR and the G70, because I like to get excited about new products coming up on the market, and I enoy talking about them (even if all there is to talk about, is rumors)

If you take such a great offence at that, then put me on your ignore list.
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Man I don't care what you think or who's a !!!!!!...I was just looking for a response to my argument. I don't know why you always get so defensive...just argue...that's all I ask for...stop whining all the time...
 
Tigerblade said:
Let's hope that AMR gives the power of 2 cards.....instead of the varying degrees that SLi give.

Yes it's fun to speculate, but saying one is wrong and one is right when we only know what one side does is a little pointless. Hopefully numbers will be out soon and then the real fun begins ;)
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Well it's just speculation...I dont' think anyone here has any delusions about the importance of discussing things we have very little information about...

As far as getting the power of 2 cards...I really don't think it's possible with the complexity of the modern gpu...at some point you have to divide up the workload...textures, geometry and pixel shaders have to be split...and since all videogames don't have perfectly straight horizontal and vertical lines, there's going to be some overlap in the usage of the cards...

It's just a question of what's the most efficient way of tackling that problem...personally having one straight line seems to make sense since it will result in less duplication of textures in memory...however, it's probably harder to balance since the line moves...so there's some cpu overhead...but with the tiles you get much more duplication of textures and no geometry scaling...so I'm just wondering which people think will be more efficient...
 
It never fails. You Nvidia turds always have to ruin an ATI based topic.

I'm positive that your fanb0y trolling is based upon your fear that ATI might do a dual-card solution better and cheaper than Nvidia. That's what I'm hoping for. And if it's not, o well I'll just buy a r520 and be happy.

And you won't find me soiling Nvidia based threads with my opinion.
 
Mister E said:
It never fails. You Nvidia turds always have to ruin an ATI based topic.

I'm positive that your fanb0y trolling is based upon your fear that ATI might do a dual-card solution better and cheaper than Nvidia. That's what I'm hoping for. And if it's not, o well I'll just buy a r520 and be happy.

And you won't find me soiling Nvidia based threads with my opinion.
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To be fair, the title of the post was sort of bashing Nvidias SLI, so it's understandable why some would take offence
 
Mister E said:
It never fails. You Nvidia turds always have to ruin an ATI based topic.

I'm positive that your fanb0y trolling is based upon your fear that ATI might do a dual-card solution better and cheaper than Nvidia. That's what I'm hoping for. And if it's not, o well I'll just buy a r520 and be happy.

And you won't find me soiling Nvidia based threads with my opinion.
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If you want to make an ATi-based thread...put it in the ATi section...that's what it's there for...

If you put it in the main video card section...it's fair game...

And nobody is offended here...it's just a matter of fact that there are a lot of questionable things concerning ATi's implementation...I have no doubt the r520 will be awesome...but AMR sounds more and more like a hack every time I hear about it...

They use a dongle for crying out loud...doesn't that sound messed up to you?

As for all this !!!!!! nonsense...all I'm doing is giving my opinion...I take in all the information and this what I think...I'm sitting here asking for you guys to convince me otherwise...I'm only looking for a little discussion...so stop with the finger-pointing and name calling because it's just plain lame.
 
MartinX said:
Ah right, you just saw the word "God" and saw red, I get ya know.

I'll concede that that was an unecessarily emotive choice of wording.

If I swapped that for "...in a superior position..." would you accept the rest of the stuff as valid?

Because it is you know.

*spambrake initialised*
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no, did you read my post? ATI is not, nor have they been in a superior position for some time. Will that change? MAYBE. when their new dual card tech is actually released and people can actually run it and test it and then we can compare em. Until then, Its comparing apples to vaporware...pointless. ATI has to overcome a public preception of paperlaunches and hype. People are becoming less and less influenced by hype...

I love competition. And when the time comes around for me to make another GPU purchase, i might choose ATI, or I might choose Nvidia. But if I do, it will be based upon facts. Reviews, benchmarks, availability. Not hype or anything some PR department wrote up and pontificating fan boys repeat verbatim.
 
ATI's solution is sorta like RAID0 for video cards. :) All comparisons at this point are speculation, until these baddies hit the skids and we can test with one... I will say (for my own speculation) that I had bet two X850XTPE's (or three for that matter, lol) will take the crown for fastest setup until the next generation of cards is available to consumers.
 
Steel Chicken said:
did you read my post?
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Yes, but I didn't like it, so I made up a new one in my head and answered that instead.

What I was sort of thinking was that prior to the current set, the ATI x series and the Nvidia 6xxx series, ATI had the clearly dominant technology (unless you want to tell me that the 5xxx series was nvidias finest hour...), in the current generation I pretty much consider it a draw, to my mind the benefits of SM3.0 and SLI have been too marginal (for various reasons) to really give nvidia a clear advantage.

Incidentally, since august last year I've been running a Gainward 6800ultra golden sample.

I want to be absolutly clear here, I'm not saying "ATI is TEH bestest!" and Nvidia should just give up and make dash boards for cars, I have been consistent all along with the IF it works like it's supposed to it'll be pretty great (which I really can't see an arguement against) and Nvidia will have to go some to match or beat it, BUT we don't know what Nvidia is doing next. It's all conditionals and provisos. I have stated, more than once now, that I am waiting to see how ATI and Nvidias competing technologies shape up in the real world before making a decision, which, unless I'm going mental is pretty much the same position that you espouse...

I have to stop now or Kyle might beat me.
 
revenant said:
ATI's solution is sorta like RAID0 for video cards. :) All comparisons at this point are speculation, until these baddies hit the skids and we can test with one... I will say (for my own speculation) that I had bet two X850XTPE's (or three for that matter, lol) will take the crown for fastest setup until the next generation of cards is available to consumers.
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I would imagine that r520 will be faster than 2 x850xtpe's...what's really interesting to me is how desparate nvidia is to get back on top...if they wanted to get all crazy...they could release that dual 6800Ultra card...only with dual G70s...and then you could SLi that...so 4 G70s in one system...

Similarly...ATi can do the same thing with r520...the options are limitless and both companies want the performance crown BAD...I can't wait to see how despearate they get...
 
^eMpTy^ said:
I would imagine that r520 will be faster than 2 x850xtpe's...what's really interesting to me is how desparate nvidia is to get back on top...if they wanted to get all crazy...they could release that dual 6800Ultra card...only with dual G70s...and then you could SLi that...so 4 G70s in one system...

Similarly...ATi can do the same thing with r520...the options are limitless and both companies want the performance crown BAD...I can't wait to see how despearate they get...
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Jesus tapdancing christ, 4 G70s!, Youd need an 900Watt PSU For JUST The video cards...
 
MartinX said:
Yes, but I didn't like it, so I made up a new one in my head and answered that instead.

What I was sort of thinking was that prior to the current set, the ATI x series and the Nvidia 6xxx series, ATI had the clearly dominant technology (unless you want to tell me that the 5xxx series was nvidias finest hour...), in the current generation I pretty much consider it a draw, to my mind the benefits of SM3.0 and SLI have been too marginal (for various reasons) to really give nvidia a clear advantage.

Incidentally, since august last year I've been running a Gainward 6800ultra golden sample.

I want to be absolutly clear here, I'm not saying "ATI is TEH bestest!" and Nvidia should just give up and make dash boards for cars, I have been consistent all along with the IF it works like it's supposed to it'll be pretty great (which I really can't see an arguement against) and Nvidia will have to go some to match or beat it, BUT we don't know what Nvidia is doing next. It's all conditionals and provisos. I have stated, more than once now, that I am waiting to see how ATI and Nvidias competing technologies shape up in the real world before making a decision, which, unless I'm going mental is pretty much the same position that you espouse...

I have to stop now or Kyle mught beat me.
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Well I think this past round has to go to nvidia just because they've won back so much mindshare...6800s outnumber x800s on the steam survey by over 30%...and that's in a game massively promoted by ATi...

ATi rode the r300 architecture for all its worth...r520 will be the project that defines them as a company...if they hit a homerun with r520...then the x800 problems were just a flash in the pan and ATi really is top dog...on the other hand...if r520 fails to beat G70...then it was the r300 that was the flash in the pan and nVidia is the overall winner...since they've beaten ATi every generation before r300 and they now have arguably beaten them after r300...

Blah...can somebody please post some r520 benchmarks? just make them up, I don't care...just...I need SOMETHING...I hate waiting...
 
Hate_Bot said:
Jesus tapdancing christ, 4 G70s!, Youd need an 900Watt PSU For JUST The video cards...
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Well I already have 550watts...what's 350 more? Anybody who would buy such a thing certainly won't be worried about their electric bill...
 
^eMpTy^ said:
Well I think this past round has to go to nvidia just because they've won back so much mindshare...6800s outnumber x800s on the steam survey by over 30%...and that's in a game massively promoted by ATi...

ATi rode the r300 architecture for all its worth...r520 will be the project that defines them as a company...if they hit a homerun with r520...then the x800 problems were just a flash in the pan and ATi really is top dog...on the other hand...if r520 fails to beat G70...then it was the r300 that was the flash in the pan and nVidia is the overall winner...since they've beaten ATi every generation before r300 and they now have arguably beaten them after r300...

Blah...can somebody please post some r520 benchmarks? just make them up, I don't care...just...I need SOMETHING...I hate waiting...
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k

R520: 3Dmark03: 12000000000

HL2 FPS: 200

Doom3 FPS: 200

Far Cry FPS: 200

All with max settings, at 2000x1800 resolution :p
 
Hate_Bot said:
k

R520: 3Dmark03: 12000000000

HL2 FPS: 200

Doom3 FPS: 200

Far Cry FPS: 200

All with max settings, at 2000x1800 resolution :p
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You should change your sig then...it still says MX440SE...;)
 
Steel Chicken said:
no, did you read my post? ATI is not, nor have they been in a superior position for some time. Will that change? MAYBE. when their new dual card tech is actually released and people can actually run it and test it and then we can compare em. Until then, Its comparing apples to vaporware...pointless. ATI has to overcome a public preception of paperlaunches and hype. People are becoming less and less influenced by hype...

I love competition. And when the time comes around for me to make another GPU purchase, i might choose ATI, or I might choose Nvidia. But if I do, it will be based upon facts. Reviews, benchmarks, availability. Not hype or anything some PR department wrote up and pontificating fan boys repeat verbatim.
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Alrighty, im here, everyone can rest and breath some relief.

Chicken, you have absolutly no idea what you are talking about. You dont know anything about ATI multi gpu right? WHY ARE YOU POSTING HOW ITS GOING TO WORK THEN! Ever heard of load ballancing?! Oh my god, isnt it, just, possible, that a faster card can take over more of the graphic load? Jeez, theres a thought. And yes, comparing a 550 dollar video card to a 160 dollar video card and saying it wont work well so MVP will suck, did you stay at a holiday inn express? Cause you sure are a genious. Lets ignore the main point that a high end card of the previous year can work with a high end card of the next year and...give you a lovely upgrade path. Rather then junking two cards and having to get two more, i can salvage one! Noooo, thats a good point so lets compare a low end card to a super high end, that will help me right?

ATI hasnt been on top for a long while? How about the entire year of 2003? Oops slipped your mind.

Hey ATI is talking shit about Nvidia, ATI doesnt have a product out in the public, ATI has a ways to go to prove themselves to the Nvidia ass kissers, yes this is all true. Nothing Nvidia didnt do when they were releasing SLI. They said ATI could never get a product out cause it took them YEARS of work to do this. But then why do the same people turn around and say straight out in every comparison thread "ATI WILL be inferior to Nvidia; ATI cannot be better, if you think ATI will be your a fan boy omgz!". I can argue my points perfectly fine without saying that stuff about Nvidia products.

Last thing, please, stop about the platinum edition. Ever heard of the X800XT? 20 lower core, 80 lower memory. Very comparable? Very strong performing card? Sells for less then 500? Ever heard of this? Oh my god ATI does make a good amount of working products? News to many of you who have some dilusion that the platinum edition was ATIs only card.
 
^eMpTy^ said:
Now about that external dongle...WTF...are they just going to be recompositing the image like V2 SLI did? That seems just really hacked together IMHO...I certainly hope that doesn't turn out to be the case. Perhaps that will only be a way of supporting older boards...or supporting integrated video.
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You know, since no existing cards apparently can be "master cards" it is a possibility that they will have a DVI IN port. Now that would give you a 500MB/s dedicated data link with no degradation at all for frame buffer data to go from slave to master. Since more or less all ATI cards after the 9700PRO do have DVI out it would be a logical solution.
 
The dongle makes sense if you think about it. Since every card has at least 2 monito slots, the dongle will only take up one, you can (in theory) run an infinate amount of cards:

Since it will only take up one slot (whichever one of the dual DVI Slots) you can alternate between the slots, just adding more and more cards.

This is good with PCI-E, the reason being, you can have 6 PCI-Ex16 slots, since these can be made to run as x4 slots (for expansion cards) you can have them run at that, and gradually buy more and more cards, till you have 6 :p

imagine that, 6 R520s or X850XT-PEs *drool*
 
Hate_Bot said:
The dongle makes sense if you think about it. Since every card has at least 2 monito slots, the dongle will only take up one, you can (in theory) run an infinate amount of cards:

Since it will only take up one slot (whichever one of the dual DVI Slots) you can alternate between the slots, just adding more and more cards.

This is good with PCI-E, the reason being, you can have 6 PCI-Ex16 slots, since these can be made to run as x4 slots (for expansion cards) you can have them run at that, and gradually buy more and more cards, till you have 6 :p

imagine that, 6 R520s or X850XT-PEs *drool*
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ok first off...it has to fit in an x16 slot...and there are only 2 of those per motherboard for the foreseeable future...

second off...we're talking about going through a DVI port here...that is NOT like the PCB on Nvidia cards...that's like the Voodoo2 SLi which separated the image and then put it back together via analog connectors...

if the dongle is passing information from gpu to gpu that's cool...if it's used to recomposite a piece of the image with another piece...that could lead to serious image quality issues and sounds like a serious hack-job...
 
Does anyone here have a technical reason for why tiling is more efficient than SFR? Or is it that checkerboards are cooler than split-screens so it must be faster? ATI is going to have to deal with the same issues that Nvidia has been doing for the past year. It is how well they work around these issues that will determine the success of AMR.
 
trinibwoy said:
Does anyone here have a technical reason for why tiling is more efficient than SFR? Or is it that checkerboards are cooler than split-screens so it must be faster? ATI is going to have to deal with the same issues that Nvidia has been doing for the past year. It is how well they work around these issues that will determine the success of AMR.
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Well for one thing, ATI has been doing Multi-VPU for quite some time, for military/commercial use, so I suppose they've gone around most of these problems.

Secondly, it's because the load is shared more equally with both cards, with less processing needed to split the load (rather then with the Nvidia solution, where the chipset has to calculate how much of each image to give to each card)
 
Hate_Bot said:
Well for one thing, ATI has been doing Multi-VPU for quite some time, for military/commercial use, so I suppose they've gone around most of these problems.

Secondly, it's because the load is shared more equally with both cards, with less processing needed to split the load (rather then with the Nvidia solution, where the chipset has to calculate how much of each image to give to each card)
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Fair enough. ATI does have a lot of experience with tiling. Though I'm not sure how that experience translates to the consumer space. I have no idea how similar (or different) the techniques are between those applications and today's games.

Why do you think ATI needs less processing? For a mismatched setup the driver will need to determine how many tiles to assign to each card. Also, Nvidia's overhead for SFR seems pretty minimal. My guess is that it works as such -

1. Get render times for both cards for previous frame
2. Calculate ratio
3. Adjust split line to new ratio

There may be more to it but running that logic on a modern processor effectively results in zero overhead. Once the graphics cards receive their new boundaries they just cull all geometry that isn't in their space.

edit: I think I'm missing something here because SLI does show some losses in CPU limited situations. Guess we'll just have to wait and see if AMR suffers the same fate.
 
FanATIc said:
SLI been retail 5 months. where is this one year thing coming from?
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You should think before you post. Do you think Nvidia only started working on SLI drivers and compatibility issues after the product was available at retail? :rolleyes: You couldn't have picked a more apt nickname BTW. ;)
 
trinibwoy said:
You should think before you post. Do you think Nvidia only started workin on SLI drivers and compatibility issues after the product was available at retail? :rolleyes: You couldn't have picked a more apt nickname BTW. ;)
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it was this or nvidiot

Nvidia claimed they started working on it right after they bought it. 4 years or something right? Shit wide screen support, aweful game support at launch, hacking games for support through riva, no dual monitor. No, i dont think they've started working on much until the 6 months prior to launch and i believe they are now continuing to work on it. I do not think they've made this massive dedicated effort for almost 5 years though. ATI may prove that right or wrong. Less then a month to go, we'll see.
 
Hate_Bot said:
Well for one thing, ATI has been doing Multi-VPU for quite some time, for military/commercial use, so I suppose they've gone around most of these problems.

Secondly, it's because the load is shared more equally with both cards, with less processing needed to split the load (rather then with the Nvidia solution, where the chipset has to calculate how much of each image to give to each card)
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1. The tile-based rendering does not scale geometry processing.
2. Tile-based rendering is more wasteful with texture memory since textures must be duplicated across many lines instead of just one.

Nvidia has all the IP and half the engineers from 3dfx...you might remember them, they invented multi-gpu. I don't think it gets any more experienced than that.
 
FanATIc said:
it was this or nvidiot

Nvidia claimed they started working on it right after they bought it. 4 years or something right? Shit wide screen support, aweful game support at launch, hacking games for support through riva, no dual monitor. No, i dont think they've started working on much until the 6 months prior to launch and i believe they are now continuing to work on it. I do not think they've made this massive dedicated effort for almost 5 years though. ATI may prove that right or wrong. Less then a month to go, we'll see.
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Well it's a complex system. Just because they didn't have all the bugs worked out at day one doesn't mean they haven't been working on it. Hell it's 6 months later and ATi is still working on it...and they've been doing multi-gpu since the early 1960s...just ask Hate_Bot.
 
^eMpTy^ said:
Well it's a complex system. Just because they didn't have all the bugs worked out at day one doesn't mean they haven't been working on it. Hell it's 6 months later and ATi is still working on it...and they've been doing multi-gpu since the early 1960s...just ask Hate_Bot.
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Well to be honost when i first heard about SLI i was hoping ATI would bolster support for a dual core board to fight it rather then go the same route. So im a little dissapointed. I dont know how it will work, but i guess i'll buy it.
 
FanATIc said:
Well to be honost when i first heard about SLI i was hoping ATI would bolster support for a dual core board to fight it rather then go the same route. So im a little dissapointed. I dont know how it will work, but i guess i'll buy it.
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I kinda liked the idea of Alienware's solution. That way everything would be vendor agnostic. Then you could have an ATi card and an Nvidia card running together...the best of both worlds...
 
^eMpTy^ said:
I kinda liked the idea of Alienware's solution. That way everything would be vendor agnostic. Then you could have an ATi card and an Nvidia card running together...the best of both worlds...
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Good lord I hate it when you say something I agree with!
 
only problem, where is the alienware solution???? They have been touting it since last year's E3 and it looks like vapor??? ( i am not their biggest fan) :mad:
 
magoo said:
only problem, where is the alienware solution???? They have been touting it since last year's E3 and it looks like vapor??? ( i am not their biggest fan) :mad:
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last years e3? try 2003. ;)
 
^eMpTy^ said:
I kinda liked the idea of Alienware's solution. That way everything would be vendor agnostic. Then you could have an ATi card and an Nvidia card running together...the best of both worlds...
Click to expand...
Will you make up your mind? The Alienware solution was a hackjob if anything by merging two analogue signals. To send signals over DVI is lossless, the same as your beloved SLI bridge except unidirectional.

Regarding the tile rendering, it is apparently the way the ATI GPUs already render the screen internally, one quad doing one tile each (and the reason you see a checkerboard pattern when a softmod goes wrong). The difference with AMR/MVP is that quads from the two cards share the job.
 
FanATIc said:
last years e3? try 2003. ;)
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sorry, i knew it had been quite a while.I think they have abandoned it imo. They seemed to have elected to use the standard SLI boards. Even their ALX seems to have lost a great deal of steam.
 
magoo said:
sorry, i knew it had been quite a while.I think they have abandoned it imo. They seemed to have elected to use the standard SLI boards. Even their ALX seems to have lost a great deal of steam.
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Damn, i thought a, what is it 6000 dollar computer, would have massive market. It really does look like they dropped it though. They put computers together i dont think they have the staff or brainpower to keep updating their own drivers and hardware to support each videocard.
 
mashie said:
Will you make up your mind? The Alienware solution was a hackjob if anything by merging two analogue signals. To send signals over DVI is lossless, the same as your beloved SLI bridge except unidirectional.

Regarding the tile rendering, it is apparently the way the ATI GPUs already render the screen internally, one quad doing one tile each (and the reason you see a checkerboard pattern when a softmod goes wrong). The difference with AMR/MVP is that quads from the two cards share the job.
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Since when am I required to make up my mind...;)

I was only kidding about the alienware thing...clearly it would never have been as efficient as nvidia's SLi with the controller board and such...interesting about the internal quads running a checkerboard pattern...I didn't know that...
 
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