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Why SLI/Crossfire need special chipsets?

H

halcyon

Gawd
Joined
Mar 20, 2003
Messages
717
So the true question is due SLI and Crossfire REALLY need some special function within their chipsets that ONLY their chipsets support, or is it just marketing BS to generate more revenue for the company, and something they can detect in their vid card driver and enable/disable support of?

I say this because I want to buy an nforce 4 sli board now and probably use crossfire down the road... instead of having to wait for months for crossfire 'compatible' boards to arrive...
 
Do you think that nVidia is going to sell VIA the SLI chipsets? Will ATi tell nVidia to make CrossFire chipsets? I don't think so...
 
It is entirely in their drivers to drive chipset sales.

Initally Nvidia's SLI worked with Intel chipsets, as the Xeon 75xx series PCIe chipsets were the only ones available with two PCIe 16x sized slots.

Later Nvidia disabled this in thier drivers, but if you can find the (I think) 69.xx drivers they might even work with ATI's chipset.

BTW: it is entirely possible for either ATI or Nvidia to re-enable SLI/crossfire on other chipsets if they wanted to.

==>Lazn
 
one requirement is that the chipset needs to support enough PCIe lanes that it can split them up between two PCIe slots into at least x8 mode

there also might be some logic in the chipset itself to help facilitate SLI or CrossFire respectively
 
No.. but thats not my point. My point is that I believe if you stuck two 6800 ultras into a crossfire motherboard (and had a bridge that fit the slot distances), pull out any code in the driver that specifically only enables SLI on nvidia sli chipsets, and they would work fine. And I bet it would work the other way too, crossfire on nvidia sli chipsets. I think we are just getting the shaft from graphics card manufacturers that want to pigeonhole you into using THEIR vid cards AND their motherboards.
 
halcyon said:
No.. but thats not my point. My point is that I believe if you stuck two 6800 ultras into a crossfire motherboard (and had a bridge that fit the slot distances), pull out any code in the driver that specifically only enables SLI on nvidia sli chipsets, and they would work fine. And I bet it would work the other way too, crossfire on nvidia sli chipsets. I think we are just getting the shaft from graphics card manufacturers that want to pigeonhole you into using THEIR vid cards AND their motherboards.
Click to expand...

Yeap, shitty eh? But what are you going to do about it?
 
Brent_Justice said:
one requirement is that the chipset needs to support enough PCIe lanes that it can split them up between two PCIe slots into at least x8 mode

there also might be some logic in the chipset itself to help facilitate SLI or CrossFire respectively
Click to expand...

Scary to contradict the great Brent, but SLI does work fine with one 16x slot and one 4x slot (on the Intel chipset MB's). MSI even had it working on a 16x slot and a 2x slot. (NF4 Ultra, not SLI chipset) http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD05NTc

But when Nvidia removed that ability from their SLI drivers, it made that MB dead in the water for MSI.

==>Lazn
 
halcyon said:
No.. but thats not my point. My point is that I believe if you stuck two 6800 ultras into a crossfire motherboard (and had a bridge that fit the slot distances), pull out any code in the driver that specifically only enables SLI on nvidia sli chipsets, and they would work fine. And I bet it would work the other way too, crossfire on nvidia sli chipsets.
Click to expand...

Halcyon, I've been stating this too. I'm a firm believer that the only difference between the Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire edit and the nForce4 SLI chipsets are their respective manufacturers and the features not related to dual graphics cards. As far as I can find from either IHV is that they created the ability to support to two PCI-e graphics slots and that it will split the lanes available to both to 8. Other than that there isn't some hidden channel that only is utilized by x and doesn't exist on z.

Future editions having more lanes will possibly have more slots for more than two cards, or provide a full 16 lanes to each card.
 
SLI is coming to the Intel and VIA chipsets. It's not a hardware issue, it's a software issue. When NVIDIA & Intel announced their cross licensing deal SLI on Intel chipsets was mentioned. I also read a VIA press release about them using both SLI and Crossfire.

I'm sure part of the problem is maintaining sales, however the other problem is tweaking the chipset drivers to work with either ATI or Crossfire.
 
Wouldn't it be in the interest of Nvidia and ATI to work together for once? Think about it any SLI/Crossfire board they would both get a cut, rather than just from the sales of the respective chipsets. I personally don't like the idea of being "stuck" using one brand of video card on a motherboard. I normally buy Nvidia, but I like to test out an ATI on occasions.
 
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