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Sli Enabled With My Single 6800gt!!
- Thread starter ohgod
- Start date
apHytHiaTe
2[H]4U
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ok dude hit printscreen, then paste it into microsoft paint. save it as a jpg or something, then host it on photobucket.com
apHytHiaTe
2[H]4U
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just send it to me
yhpm w/ my email address
yhpm w/ my email address
Brent_Justice
Moderator
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SLI requires at least two PCI-E video cards, period.
apHytHiaTe
2[H]4U
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K man, i understand. Just send it to me, and i will host/post on my photobucket.
a gesture of kindness, from one [L]imp to another.
a gesture of kindness, from one [L]imp to another.
apHytHiaTe
2[H]4U
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np
Is there anyone here who doesn't have a Doom3 screenshot as their background?! (I do...)
So - I guess the 65.xx drivers are the first to support SLI then? Hopefully the nforce4 motherboards won't be too long! (if they're available this year I'll be happy).
So - I guess the 65.xx drivers are the first to support SLI then? Hopefully the nforce4 motherboards won't be too long! (if they're available this year I'll be happy).
lithium726
[H]F Junkie
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Arseface said:
i dont!
Falls Included
I'm happy & gay too
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- May 30, 2003
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- 3,701
me either, i have nothing on my main, and some [H] design on the lappy
Schadenfroh
Limp Gawd
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/patently waits for nforce4 to have the needed PCI-E slots
avatar_of_might
[H]ard|Gawd
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isnt that coming out this fall/winter?Schadenfroh said:
Nobody noticed the big news in that shot?
The SLI, as nVidia has been advertising it, is 'split-screen', where one card renders the top half of the screen and the other the bottom. Which has spun off all kinds of speculation on what happens in games where the sky is pretty bland and the ground isn't - it would have to change the ratio on the fly of what is rendering what.
And, other questions, like how aniso filtering would work if the ground texture extended from one display to the other, and anti-aliasing across the split line (all solvable problems, granted, but problems nonetheless)....
However, that screen cap....
Well, looks like there is a new mode, now, doesn't it? "Alternate Frame Rendering"! IE., one card renders one full frame, then the other card renders the next full frame! That's MUCH cooler!
The SLI, as nVidia has been advertising it, is 'split-screen', where one card renders the top half of the screen and the other the bottom. Which has spun off all kinds of speculation on what happens in games where the sky is pretty bland and the ground isn't - it would have to change the ratio on the fly of what is rendering what.
And, other questions, like how aniso filtering would work if the ground texture extended from one display to the other, and anti-aliasing across the split line (all solvable problems, granted, but problems nonetheless)....
However, that screen cap....
Well, looks like there is a new mode, now, doesn't it? "Alternate Frame Rendering"! IE., one card renders one full frame, then the other card renders the next full frame! That's MUCH cooler!
Dig1tal_Pr0be
Weaksauce
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- Jun 28, 2004
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- 67
Spliit frame does not necessarily mean half and half, they could be referring to traditional splitting each line and re-interleaving.
No, there are articles on their website about it. It's half-and-half. They were very specific that it was NOT the alternate-line method used on the previous Voodoo2 SLI system (that SLI stood for what you are talking about - scan-line interleave. This is scalable-link architecture. Same acronym - surely for 'brand recognition', but different meaning and execution.)
was thinking exactly the same, dderidex! AFR was the method ATI implemented with their maxx line of cards, as opposed to 3dfxs or nvidias split-screen or alternate scanline rendering. i was under the impression they had this type of tech patented, but it looks like they haven't...
can anybody shed some light on what advantages each method has? possible bottlenecks and the like, i mean.
edit: ok, some stuff on that matter:
"3dfx's SLI technology has one chip draw the even lines and another chip drawing the odd lines. This split the fill rate evenly, however the triangle setup performance was unchanged. Synchronization between two PCI cards was very easy, but with AGP on the way, SLI technology was clearly on its deathbed.
In February of 1999, Metabyte announced their multiple accelerator solution, PGC (Parallel Graphics Configuration) which was allowed an AGP and PCI card to work in tandem. Metabyte's PGC solution involved splitting up the rendering workload by having each card render a portion of the screen. Since AGP video cards were faster than PCI, the division did not have to be 50-50 and instead could be biased toward the faster AGP card. However, there was no easy way to split up the performance accurately based upon the scene. Still, the magic lay in the synchronization of the two images and the wizards at Metabyte had no problems. One limitation of PGC was that top portion of the screen was not necessarily as complex as the bottom portion of the screen which results in an improper load balance.
Alternate Frame Rendering
The first issue with SLI and PGC that ATI had to address was the difficulty of synchronizing an AGP and PCI device without slowing down AGP graphics card. The fact of the matter was that there really wasn't a good way to address this problem and ATI eliminated the issue by developing a single card solution with two Rage 128 Pro accelerators. This is similar to Quantum3D's cards that offer multiple 3dfx accelerators on-board with the main difference being that ATI didn't want to involve an additional AGP or PCI bridge.
With the AGP/PCI problem taken care of, ATI just had to divide the work between the accelerators efficiently. What they came up with was a system where each chip renders alternate frames instead of splitting the work for every single frame. The beauty of this design was that the workload between the two chips remained pretty constant and at the same time, the chips triangle engine of each chip was used to its full potential. Initially, there were questions of latency or lag in games. Although there are many theoretical reasons why one would expect lag, ATI claims that the latency is no different from triple buffering and indeed I did not notice any significant lag in a game of Quake 3. Movement seemed perfectly natural as did firing. Although I don't play Quake professionally, I am very sensitive to the synchronization problems between the video and audio of a poorly designed DVD players, and I can easily tell the difference between MP3s and an original source in a double blind test.
Memory concerns
The MAXX card needs 64MB of memory because each accelerator has to have its own separate 32MB frame buffer/texture memory. This is actually a big problem for ATI not for any technical reason, but purely for cost concerns. At the time ATI was developing the Maxx, RAM prices were dirt cheap. Closer to production, RAM prices crept up slowly and finally peaked shortly after the market panicked over the massive earthquake in Taiwan. Fortunately, Taiwan quickly recovered, and all worries about RAM shortages were overblown. RAM prices are on their way down but the manufacturing split between Rambus and DRAM will prevent prices from falling to previous lows, and analysts are now predicting another DRAM shortage because of rising demand.
One drawback to the AFR approach, compared to a single "mega" chip from nVidia or S3, is that the increase in performance can only be realized in fully screen mode, which is no big deal at this point, since we still run our games in full screen mode. Once we have excess power available, then we could code in one window, email in another, host a quake game in one window, play Unreal Tournament in another, while watching DVD's. You laugh now, but just wait and see. "
firingsquad.com on the fury maxx... AGES AGO
can anybody shed some light on what advantages each method has? possible bottlenecks and the like, i mean.
edit: ok, some stuff on that matter:
"3dfx's SLI technology has one chip draw the even lines and another chip drawing the odd lines. This split the fill rate evenly, however the triangle setup performance was unchanged. Synchronization between two PCI cards was very easy, but with AGP on the way, SLI technology was clearly on its deathbed.
In February of 1999, Metabyte announced their multiple accelerator solution, PGC (Parallel Graphics Configuration) which was allowed an AGP and PCI card to work in tandem. Metabyte's PGC solution involved splitting up the rendering workload by having each card render a portion of the screen. Since AGP video cards were faster than PCI, the division did not have to be 50-50 and instead could be biased toward the faster AGP card. However, there was no easy way to split up the performance accurately based upon the scene. Still, the magic lay in the synchronization of the two images and the wizards at Metabyte had no problems. One limitation of PGC was that top portion of the screen was not necessarily as complex as the bottom portion of the screen which results in an improper load balance.
Alternate Frame Rendering
The first issue with SLI and PGC that ATI had to address was the difficulty of synchronizing an AGP and PCI device without slowing down AGP graphics card. The fact of the matter was that there really wasn't a good way to address this problem and ATI eliminated the issue by developing a single card solution with two Rage 128 Pro accelerators. This is similar to Quantum3D's cards that offer multiple 3dfx accelerators on-board with the main difference being that ATI didn't want to involve an additional AGP or PCI bridge.
With the AGP/PCI problem taken care of, ATI just had to divide the work between the accelerators efficiently. What they came up with was a system where each chip renders alternate frames instead of splitting the work for every single frame. The beauty of this design was that the workload between the two chips remained pretty constant and at the same time, the chips triangle engine of each chip was used to its full potential. Initially, there were questions of latency or lag in games. Although there are many theoretical reasons why one would expect lag, ATI claims that the latency is no different from triple buffering and indeed I did not notice any significant lag in a game of Quake 3. Movement seemed perfectly natural as did firing. Although I don't play Quake professionally, I am very sensitive to the synchronization problems between the video and audio of a poorly designed DVD players, and I can easily tell the difference between MP3s and an original source in a double blind test.
Memory concerns
The MAXX card needs 64MB of memory because each accelerator has to have its own separate 32MB frame buffer/texture memory. This is actually a big problem for ATI not for any technical reason, but purely for cost concerns. At the time ATI was developing the Maxx, RAM prices were dirt cheap. Closer to production, RAM prices crept up slowly and finally peaked shortly after the market panicked over the massive earthquake in Taiwan. Fortunately, Taiwan quickly recovered, and all worries about RAM shortages were overblown. RAM prices are on their way down but the manufacturing split between Rambus and DRAM will prevent prices from falling to previous lows, and analysts are now predicting another DRAM shortage because of rising demand.
One drawback to the AFR approach, compared to a single "mega" chip from nVidia or S3, is that the increase in performance can only be realized in fully screen mode, which is no big deal at this point, since we still run our games in full screen mode. Once we have excess power available, then we could code in one window, email in another, host a quake game in one window, play Unreal Tournament in another, while watching DVD's. You laugh now, but just wait and see. "
firingsquad.com on the fury maxx... AGES AGO
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- Feb 14, 2004
- Messages
- 7,456
dderidex said:
Actualy its not just split screeen , It uses quandrants. The Screen is broken up into quadrants and the cards shift the load bakc and forth
The VIA K8T890 also supports dual PCI-E graphics slots (2 x16 slots... additional x2 slots are supported in the southbridge). I'd rather have an nforce board, but it looks like dual PCI-E graphics slots don't have to wait until the NF4.Schadenfroh said:
Brent_Justice
Moderator
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Chris_Morley
Former [H] Consumer Managing Ed.
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Someone asked earlier what motherboards currently supported it...we're selling Tumwater-based systems with dual PCI-Express slots right now.
www.boxxtech.com
We just validated dual PCI-E cards in the same system, both with and without SLI. Had it SLI enabled at SIGGRAPH running SpecViewPerf tests...blazing fast.
www.boxxtech.com
We just validated dual PCI-E cards in the same system, both with and without SLI. Had it SLI enabled at SIGGRAPH running SpecViewPerf tests...blazing fast.
Brent_Justice said:
So, is that card's memory 500mhz actual clock (1ghz DDR) or 500mhz DDR (250mhz actual)? Given that you noted it's GDDR3, I'm guessing 1ghz DDR....which is....really nice for an entry-level card!