ATI's SLI video cards sound much nicer than NVIDIA's

[SunnyD]

Finally a halfway decent read on how ATI's AMR is going to work.

The interface or interconnect device is supposed to be plugged into both cards' DVI ports. This approach should be very good for load balancing and at least in theory could mean that a picture can be rendered twice as fast

:beer:

 

[Gamingphreek]

Too bad you lose your DVI ports then.

Also a less controversial title will do wonders. Nvidia owners and fanboys will not like you saying it sounds nicer. It will reduce flames, you have enough posts that you should know this.

-Kevin

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Too bad you lose your DVI ports then.

Also a less controversial title will do wonders. Nvidia owners and fanboys will not like you saying it sounds nicer. It will reduce flames, you have enough posts that you should know this.

-Kevin

I wouldn't say you "lose" you DVI ports. For the DVI option it will probably be more like a Y-cable sort of thing, where the DVI ports pass through the signal to a single monitor.
Alas, I don't know.

And if the NV fanboys want to turn it into a flamewar, fine. I've used both NV and ATI cards, I loved my Ti4600, I love my Radeon 9500 Pro, I was going to upgrade to a 6600GT, but decided I'm going to wait to see the chips fall. If the whole battle is "This name is better than that name", so be it. I'll happily sit back and laugh at those posts.

 

[McArra]

Yeah, it looks great. Will see how it performs, promising....

 

[Munky]

Nice, looks promising. Now let me sit back and watch this thread turn into a BBQ.

 

[crazyeddie]

I'm an ATI fanboy, just upgraded from 9700 to X800XL. I even have a ATI Radeon Xpress 200 motherboard.

I don't think anything about any of ATI's products until they ship the damned things.

Kudos to Nvidia for actually delivering products to market and for forcing ATI to innovate.

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: crazyeddie
I'm an ATI fanboy, just upgraded from 9700 to X800XL. I even have a ATI Radeon Xpress 200 motherboard.

I don't think anything about any of ATI's products until they ship the damned things.

Kudos to Nvidia for actually delivering products to market and for forcing ATI to innovate.

Yeah, competition is nice, but it works both ways. If it weren't for the 9700, we'd still be using rehashed versions of the gf4. Or maybe the FX's [shudders at the thought...]

edit:sp

 

[Creig]

This is the first I've heard about an external "signal combiner" connecting the two DVI ports together. I was under the assumption that all data transfer between the two cards would take place through the PCI-E bus and then the master card would output the finished image to the monitor.

 

[VIAN]

Nice, a mature technology that has Hardware(hopefully won't need driver profiles) support.
Looks like ATI will start releasing DUAL DVI With these babies.

 

[imported_Kensai]

Nice.

 

[SunnyD]

BTW: Thanks to all the Nvidia supporters that post and keep it clean.

 

[Melchior]

AMR sounds pretty cool. Now the question is, will it work on an Nvidia Chipset SLI board?

I wouldn't worry about fanboys. Brand Loyalty is retarded. You spend your money (and time) for a product that delivers, not a name.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Too bad you lose your DVI ports then.

Also a less controversial title will do wonders. Nvidia owners and fanboys will not like you saying it sounds nicer. It will reduce flames, you have enough posts that you should know this.

-Kevin

How do you lose your DVI ports?
With 2 cards, you can output to one monitor when using the ATi system.
nVidia also only supports 2 displays in SLI, to have 4 displays, you need to use 2 cards in non-SLI, so I don't know what your point is.

And nVidia didn't really force ATi to innovate, as the article states, ATi have had multi-VPU systems and card systems around for a fairl while (R300).

 

[Creig]

Originally posted by: Melchior
AMR sounds pretty cool. Now the question is, will it work on an Nvidia Chipset SLI board?

It sounds as if it will be possible to use Nvidia cards in AMR on the ATI board. The RX481/RS481 chipset controls the method of load balancing/rendering and sends the pre-rendered image to the video cards. The cards then output the rendered image out to the AMR signal combiner. No SLI bridge should be necessary using NV cards.

I wish we had some concrete data on the subject instead of trying to piece together small rumors released here and there.

 

[sbuckler]

Doubt ati would allow nvidia cards to work with whatever they produce - the whole point behind doing this is to compete with nvidia, not allow them to sell more cards. As for the flame inducing title you've got to remember nvidia also tiles - that's what's happening with split frame rendering mode - so what ati is doing is no different, it's just a matter of who comes up with the most efficient implementation (dumb tiling can be very inefficient, hence all the fancy load balancing stuff in nvidia's SLI).

 

[nRollo]

Sounds good to me.

The title of this thread is pure flamebait;however, and worse yet in error. We have no clue whatsoever if ATIs solution is better than nVidia's, yet it sounds "much nicer"? I'll wait for benches and IQ comparisons to decide on that.

BTW- I do like the "working on every application" part, but wonder if by that they mean it will benefit every application? (i.e. I can force SLI on any app, it just doesn't help some)

 

[MisterChief]

*grabs the keg from ATOT's BBQ and sits back to enjoy the flames*

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: Rollo
Sounds good to me.

The title of this thread is pure flamebait;however, and worse yet in error. We have no clue whatsoever if ATIs solution is better than nVidia's, yet it sounds "much nicer"? I'll wait for benches and IQ comparisons to decide on that.

BTW- I do like the "working on every application" part, but wonder if by that they mean it will benefit every application? (i.e. I can force SLI on any app, it just doesn't help some)

That did seem to be the gist of it - it will benefit every app. Whether it will or not, we have to see.

And yes - when I said "sounds much nicer" - I meant the implementation, in practice, and the statement that it should benefit any app. All in all, on paper, it sounds like a better solution than Nvidia has at this point. But it does all come down to what it really works like.

 

[Acanthus]

All hype, no reviews.

Ill wait.

 

[housecat]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
All hype, no reviews.

Ill wait.

 

[xtknight]

good this is how it should have been done in the first place. will the memory between the two cards be combined or not? if it's implemented on the hardware level, any software will work with it. this is something I may actually consider, considering it's better implemented than software with overhead. I hope there's an advanced load balancing algorithm. depending on how low-level AMR is, you might not even need that. i love solutions that are transparent to software. easy to implement, and theoretically twice as fast (versus (twice as fast-overhead)). sort of like a videocard RAID. because if you RAID too many drives it will theoretically become slower (like if you had 4 drives it would be 3.9x as fast, or something like that). this will be the same way... ideally you wouldn't even need to make new drivers either. on second thought AMR may not be this way though because I read they were talking specifically about Direct3D and OpenGL, sounds like they have to be specially implemented.

 

[Fenuxx]

Originally posted by: xtknight
good this is how it should have been done in the first place. will the memory between the two cards be combined or not? if it's implemented on the hardware level, any software will work with it. this is something I may actually consider, considering it's better implemented than software with overhead. I hope there's an advanced load balancing algorithm. depending on how low-level AMR is, you might not even need that. i love solutions that are transparent to software. easy to implement, and theoretically twice as fast (versus (twice as fast-overhead)).

The memory will have a 99.9998% chance of NOT being shared between the 2 cards, and will probably work just as NVIDIA's SLI does in this respect.

As Rollo said, just because it will "support" all apps, doesn't mean that it will be faster on all apps. SLI can be forced on just about everything, but that doesn't mean that it will gain a worthwhile performance boost (or any performance boost at all).

Personally, about the DVI adapter thing, since ATI said that their "AMR" will work on all PCI-E cards (at least, all PCI-E ATI cards ), and some of those are DVI\VGA, what happens if you have only 1 DVI port on each card? I agree that there's probably a passthrough thingy, but if there's not, what are you to do? Even if there is, do you really want to have your monitor cable sticking out a good 6-8 inches from the back of your computer? I don't know of many people that would. Besides, it would just be really annoying. Seeing this whole thing with the dongle\passthrough thingy, makes me like NVIDIA's bridge chip more. If ATI had just gone with plugging 2 PCI-E cards into a compatible mobo, and no adapters, bridges, or dongles needed, then maybe I would think its better, but the way it stands with the adaptermaboby thing, that just plain out sucks.

 

[Matthias99]

Can we please wait until there are some official descriptions/reviews of this stuff before we start saying it "sucks" or that one or the other implementation is better? There really aren't enough details in that Inq article (what a shock) to determine anything meaningful.

 

[xtknight]

plugging the video cards into the mobo with no interconnector would impose latency issues at the mercy of the pcie bus. making predictions about AMR can't hurt, right? of course we're not certain about anything, even the inq post, until ATI officially announces it.

 

[housecat]

Originally posted by: geforcetony

Originally posted by: xtknight
good this is how it should have been done in the first place. will the memory between the two cards be combined or not? if it's implemented on the hardware level, any software will work with it. this is something I may actually consider, considering it's better implemented than software with overhead. I hope there's an advanced load balancing algorithm. depending on how low-level AMR is, you might not even need that. i love solutions that are transparent to software. easy to implement, and theoretically twice as fast (versus (twice as fast-overhead)).

The memory will have a 99.9998% chance of NOT being shared between the 2 cards, and will probably work just as NVIDIA's SLI does in this respect.

As Rollo said, just because it will "support" all apps, doesn't mean that it will be faster on all apps. SLI can be forced on just about everything, but that doesn't mean that it will gain a worthwhile performance boost (or any performance boost at all).

Personally, about the DVI adapter thing, since ATI said that their "AMR" will work on all PCI-E cards (at least, all PCI-E ATI cards ), and some of those are DVI\VGA, what happens if you have only 1 DVI port on each card? I agree that there's probably a passthrough thingy, but if there's not, what are you to do? Even if there is, do you really want to have your monitor cable sticking out a good 6-8 inches from the back of your computer? I don't know of many people that would. Besides, it would just be really annoying. Seeing this whole thing with the dongle\passthrough thingy, makes me like NVIDIA's bridge chip more. If ATI had just gone with plugging 2 PCI-E cards into a compatible mobo, and no adapters, bridges, or dongles needed, then maybe I would think its better, but the way it stands with the adaptermaboby thing, that just plain out sucks.

And its my POV that it wont be as fast as NVs method.
Why? Because a dongle like the Voodoo2 and kind of how this AMR works is the easy way. No software needed.
But dont ppl think that NV couldve easily done this.. alot cheaper/easier?

Of course.
I think theres a reason they didnt go this route. Its prob faster NV's method.. and for those dishing out $800+ on two cutting edge cards (me), you want the fastest performance out of the SLI/AMR possible in the latest games.

I could care less if it supports some game that doesnt mean squat to 98% of gamers.. NV SLI can be forced anyway.. and neither method PROMISES performance boosts in ALL games.

But as stated, who cares about all games?

People like me dont dish out near a grand to accelerate Need for Speed 1.. we do it for HL2/Doom3/Battlefield 2/Quake4!
As if Need for Speed 1 would require over a single 6800GT anyway.. not exactly a "slow" card.




I personally am a bit disappointed with ATI "SLI".. sounds like you need one of those crappy ATI motherboards and their little dongle too!

If they'd made it so you only needed the dongle, and not their POS motherboards I'd have a different opinion.
I hope it works on the Nforce4s that everyone already has.. but if not.. too bad for ATI (time to make attractive motherboards I guess).