SLI ... Future?

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simon27

Weaksauce
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Last night, I was wondering and doing some research about SLi, and just come to my mind if SLI has any long term future (2.5years +), because as far I can see, other systems with 2 video cards, died in short time...

I am asking this because, probabbly I'll consider SLi for my new rig, maybe 2x 6600GT or I'll use 1x 6600GT for a while and then switch to 2x 6800GT... And now I ask myself... is SLi going to survive almost 2 years? Or when NVidia launch their next gen card, they will forget SLi system and just throught it away?

Other question that comes to my mind, is if NVidia will give the costumers more freedom when SLI... I mean, like 1 6600GT and 1 6800Ultra or crazy things like that would be great!.

Any thoughts are welcome
-Simon
 
Well, SLi has two purposes, both of which are not dying.

Option A: Buy card #1 now, play games now, be happy now....later, games slow down, and you're not happy....buy card #2 (at much lower price than card #1, therefore being cheaper than a complete upgrade) and be happy again. :D

Option B: Buy card #1 and #2 at the same time to have the fastest possible gaming power on the market now, reguardless of price.
 
simon27 said:
Last night, I was wondering and doing some research about SLi, and just come to my mind if SLI has any long term future (2.5years +), because as far I can see, other systems with 2 video cards, died in short time...
Click to expand...

The reason the last iteration of SLI died was because the company doing it got too caught up in it. They started considering it an improvement to release cards with 2xSLI or 4xSLI built in when they should have been focusing on improving the core speed of the cards and continued to keep SLI as a bonus feature. They also should have been working on making all their cards 2D capable.

So as long as Nvidia and ATI continue to improve their core single-card solutions SLI will just be a nice "feature" just like most of their other features, and it shouldn't die out.
 
well in it's current state I can see it dying for this reason:
Once a single card passes the limitations of pci-e 8x(since 2 cards in pci-e sli run at 8x each right?), then putting 2 cards in sli will be limiting both card's abilities.
 
That my friend will take a long long long long time.
No current card is even near reaching the X16 mark let alone the X8 mark. The reason they both get X8 bandwidth from the PCIe bus is that its an even split and they have more bandwidth than they should ever need.
Also if its ever needed, they can plot another fully capable X16 slot on the board for dual x16 speed ownage. Of course its a lot more complicated then just ploping it on the board but you know what I mean.
 
darkhorse said:
well in it's current state I can see it dying for this reason:
Once a single card passes the limitations of pci-e 8x(since 2 cards in pci-e sli run at 8x each right?), then putting 2 cards in sli will be limiting both card's abilities.
Click to expand...

That's only looking at current generations and creating interations of the current technology however.

The thing about PCI-E that makes it so much better than now outdated legacy PCI cards is it's scaleability. Current technology like the nf4 pro (used in workstations) is capeable of having 2x cards running at 16x, so no havling of bandwidth. However beyond that, PCI express in the future will be capeable of expanding bandwidth accordingly. 32 lanes and 64 lanes of bandwidth per slot are not only conceivable but doable as well. 64 lanes of traffic per card will be more than enough to support the latest and greatest of video cards.

As chipsets improve, and we gain more lanes for PCI-E great things will happen, I'm excited about the technology, because for the first time we don't have to deal about IRQ's and latency, instead we have pure independant traffic.

How long it will take for us to necessitate to moving to PCI-E 32x or 64x is another story though, and for now I don't think it will be necessary. I think we'll probably hit consumer based hardware that runs at 16x for both slots first long before we ever get to PCI-E 32x let alone 64x.

That all said getting back to the thread, I don't think SLi will die at all, if anything I think it will continue to grow and get bigger. PCI-E is an interface that will allow significant expansion in the comming years as it begins to get utilized more. This will allow things like SLi to become a mainstay if not only in the high end consumer department or the workstation enviornment.
 
tsuehpsyde said:
Option A: Buy card #1 now, play games now, be happy now....later, games slow down, and you're not happy....buy card #2 (at much lower price than card #1, therefore being cheaper than a complete upgrade) and be happy again. :D
Click to expand...


Here lies the problem of that thought process...

When nVidia releases their new line of cards (G70) the 6xxx generation of cards production will slow dramatically, and only certian flavors of the cards will still be manufactured, and that is only for a short while till they phase it out completely. The cycling time of graphics cards are pretty quick when it comes to being able to buy them from your normal retailer (NewEgg, ZipZoom, Best Buy). Most likely what I can see happening is that the older generation of cards will either go down in price, but you will have to buy them from non-normal retailers or other uesrs. Or the most likely thing, the price will not go down on these non-normal retailers because they are trying to count of the fact that people will want to buy another 6xxx series card to do SLi.

IMO though, the G70 series will wipe out the 6xxx cards from the market and people thinking they were going to get another 6xxx series of card will toss out the idea and move on to the G70 core, because hey it will be newer and faster.
 
tsuehpsyde said:
...

Option B: Buy card #1 and #2 at the same time to have the fastest possible gaming power on the market now, reguardless of price.
Click to expand...
This I agree with. There are some people out there who simply want the fastest performance, price be damned. They have the cash and are willing to spend a lot get the very best performance right now. And for those people, SLI is the best solution. :)

Personally, I wouldn't go with Option A, since there will almost always be a faster card 6-9 months down the road anyway, so I'd buy 2 high-end GPU's at once and get it over with, or don't go SLI at all and wait for the dust to settle (which is what most of us mere mortals do). :p
 
I'm hoping that the future of SLI will be dual gpu cards. Several companies (ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte) have shown dual gpu cards already. It would be nice to get SLI at only a 150% cost over a single card, instead of having to buy 2 cards at 200% the cost.
 
UltimaParadox said:
Here lies the problem of that thought process...

When nVidia releases their new line of cards (G70) the 6xxx generation of cards production will slow dramatically, and only certian flavors of the cards will still be manufactured, and that is only for a short while till they phase it out completely. The cycling time of graphics cards are pretty quick when it comes to being able to buy them from your normal retailer (NewEgg, ZipZoom, Best Buy). Most likely what I can see happening is that the older generation of cards will either go down in price, but you will have to buy them from non-normal retailers or other uesrs. Or the most likely thing, the price will not go down on these non-normal retailers because they are trying to count of the fact that people will want to buy another 6xxx series card to do SLi.

IMO though, the G70 series will wipe out the 6xxx cards from the market and people thinking they were going to get another 6xxx series of card will toss out the idea and move on to the G70 core, because hey it will be newer and faster.
Click to expand...


Doubt it.You can still get 5700's and 9700's now. There will be plenty of 6800 series cards in the channel for another year or more.
 
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