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Supposively ATI's SLI will require an external connector.

S

Sgt_Strider

Gawd
Joined
Oct 29, 2003
Messages
945
According to the Inquirer, ATI's cards will require an external connector like Nvidia's SLI cards in order to get "SLI" to work. What is interesting is that it said current X800 series can use the external connector to get SLI performance. My question is, does such connector even exists on the x800 series to allow an external connector to connect to?

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23265
 
The DVI-D connector supports all kinds of Info as well as the video signal. It'll probobly just be a DVI-D link.
 
Heh, the 3DFX Voodoo 5 6000 comes to mind for some reason...
 
well what's that connection that my x800xt pe has next to the molex connection?

Is it another source of power ? Might be the connector they're talkin about.

If that's the connection then they might have both AGP SLi and PCI-E SLi. Is that why they're building their own motherboard with Sapphire ?

I knew that the current cards will support it, I'm just waiting to find out more.
 
No that yellow connector (I think the one your talking about) is for TV out and jazz like that and was only sold with the apropiate cables in Europe for some reason. AGP SLi wont exist ever sadly....
 
Impaqt said:
The DVI-D connector supports all kinds of Info as well as the video signal. It'll probobly just be a DVI-D link.
Click to expand...

As quoted on Hexus:

So now you’re thinking how cool is this, and you want one…. well, erm… the thing is right now there aren’t actually any of these cards available, so although ATi have done us all a favour by building in a level of future proofing by maintaining the use of ‘older’ cards for us, we can’t actually go ATi MVP right now.
Click to expand...

Source

Not sure how accurate this is, as the articles from 9 days ago. Having to buy a new card for MvP would be the shits though. But, I don't recall PCI-E nVidia's being SLi capable from the beginning either.. I could be wrong though.
 
This is old news. ATI and Nvidia cards both have an "image" connection internally.
Alienware used this common bit of knowledge to produce its X2 setup.
In fact ATI's plan sounds more and more like Alienware's idea every day.

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How so?
I never knew much about ALienwares suposed 3D design for Dual GPU so enlighten me.
 
{NG}Fidel said:
How so?
I never knew much about ALienwares suposed 3D design for Dual GPU so enlighten me.
Click to expand...

It requires a "hub".
It requires an external connector between video cards.
Requires a chipset that can communicate with 2 PCI-express x16 slots.

These are all rumors, of course.
 
I doubt they will use the DVI-D connector for SLI. It doesn't make any sense to me as it's only output????

Well I'll wait and see what computex have to show about ATI's MVP.
 
Chix4mat said:
Not sure how accurate this is, as the articles from 9 days ago. Having to buy a new card for MvP would be the shits though. But, I don't recall PCI-E nVidia's being SLi capable from the beginning either.. I could be wrong though.
Click to expand...

Yep you are wrong, every PCI-E 6600GT/6800/6800GT/6800 Ultra was SLI capable from the beginning :)

Though, it is true that lesser chipsets such as the PCI-E FX series (which were actually bridged AGP cards) and the 6200 don't support SLI.
 
Ahh ok, thanks. I knew the lower cards were not SLi capable, but I would have sworn the first batch of higher end were not SLi capable.

Thanks :)
 
What is confusing the matter is that various vendors involved with new MvP or AMR (waiting for the final name, since this seems to be interchangable at the moment) leak information about AMR. Some of that information concerns existing ATI cards (no bridge required) and future ATI cards (maybe a bridge required).

Let's speculate with the little known facts as they currently stand:

1. ATI has officially stated their solution will not require an external bridge.

What's important to note, is that nVIDIA's SLI will also work without the bridge athough at a reduced performance. So it's technically proven that an MVP solution can use the existing PCI-E infrastructure to send the textures and framebuffer contents back and forth for comparison.

2. Some vendors releasing MvP motherboards acidentally released a connector requirement rumor. This could be for possible future ATI cards that have a connector designed onto the PCB, a connector that doesn't exist on the current cards.

HighTest's speculation:

1. Both vendors solutions will work with industry PCI-E standards in that two PEG (PCI-E Graphics or x16) slots will be used. Examining the layout of the PCI-E PEG slots, I don't find any proprietary pins in use.

Depending on the chipset, when in dual PEG mode each slot will be either x8 by x8 or x16 by x16 (nVIDIA's nForce4 SLI chipset only supports 20 PCI-E lanes, thus the reason that it's splitting x16 channels into two x8 channels). SLI motherboards that are not configured in dual PEG mode for SLI are x16 and x1 respectively. If ATI's MvP chipset supports more lanes, it would be technically possible to have two x16 lanes. This is all the motherboard chipset puts into play, two PEG slots with the same number of lanes for two graphics cards when configured for multi-graphics support. When examining the current PCI-E x16 slots on my MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI motherboard, I'm not discovering any secret lane used solely for SLI for example.

2. nVIDIA's cards then require SLI capable drivers in order to use this feature. ATI's MvP or AMR will also require the drivers that support this feature in order to operate. What's important to note is that older nVIDIA drivers, SLI wasn't capable even though nVIDIA had placed the bridge connectors on the 6600 and 6800 PCI-E product lines. ATI has stated that SuperTiling (the technique used in AMR) has been present in the current product lines hardware for a while.

3. In tests, nVIDIA's SLI is capable of running without the bridge but a performance hit is taken in order for the framebuffer contents to be compared. The bridge helps to mitigate this by connecting the two cards directly for this purpose removing the need to send the content over the PCI-E bus. ATI's AMR "may" have this bridge in the future, as possibly leaked by some motherboard vendors.

I suspect that 800 and 850 based PCI-E cards will be capable of being utilized in an AMR mode without the bridge connector. While the performance will be good, it wouldn't be as high as if the connector had been designed on the card. Since that's water under the bridge, no pun intended ;), the existing installed card base will be able to use AMR and happy that they don't need to purchase all new cards. Possible future cards based on the R520 or latter chipsets could have the bridge connector feature implemented. The result of this is that ATI could say, upgrade for not only the new chipset features but the additional performance the bridge connector will allow while using AMR! Cool marketing gimmick, hmm..

Again, I could be completely blowing smoke out of my backside, but this is a possibility.
 
{NG}Fidel said:
No that yellow connector (I think the one your talking about) is for TV out and jazz like that and was only sold with the apropiate cables in Europe for some reason. AGP SLi wont exist ever sadly....
Click to expand...

I'm not talking about that yellow connector ..

this is what i'm talking about
 
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