Dual-VGA War

[Architect]

Not long ago, nVidia amazed the public with their latest gimmick to improve their sales and overall gaming performance with SLI. SLI is in other words gave the user the ability to use two VGA's at the same time, allowing them to share their performances to give you a much higher overall performance of ~90%, which dramatically increased performances in games but a large significant amount.

After everyone got into the game, ATi than had to accept a major downfall in popularity as their overall reputation was taken away from them, unable to keep up with the Dual-VGA market. Until now, ATi's new Mutli-Rendering technology, much like SLI's equivalent, will; or has stormed the world, reclaiming their title.

Will this compare with SLI??
Any comments?? Suggestions or beliefs??

 

[ohnnyj]

I don't think ATI has anounced anything specific yet so it is too early to tell.

 

[Architect]

Just through some facts that ATi Press Release has showned, a standard X850XT - one of the only Radeon cards to support MR Technology, alreadly achieves the same performances ratings that a 6800Ultra achieves alone, but the one question I'm wanting to find out is....If SLI offers users a ~90% performance increase over a single card, how much would you think Multi-Rendering offers??A slightly bit more?, less? or 100% in performance increase.

 

[cbehnken]

Originally posted by: Architect
Just through some facts that ATi Press Release has showned, a standard X850XT - one of the only Radeon cards to support MR Technology, alreadly achieves the same performances ratings that a 6800Ultra achieves alone, but the one question I'm wanting to find out is....If SLI offers users a ~90% performance increase over a single card, how much would you think Multi-Rendering offers??A slightly bit more?, less? or 100% in performance increase.

Just look at SLI reviews and you'll get an idea of how well ATI's solution will work.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Architect
Just through some facts that ATi Press Release has showned, a standard X850XT - one of the only Radeon cards to support MR Technology, alreadly achieves the same performances ratings that a 6800Ultra achieves alone, but the one question I'm wanting to find out is....If SLI offers users a ~90% performance increase over a single card, how much would you think Multi-Rendering offers??A slightly bit more?, less? or 100% in performance increase.

Nobody will know for sure until we see it running.

Obviously it can't be more than a 100% increase. If I had to guess, I'd say ~50% faster than a single card, and I'd be impressed by a 75% or better improvement. In theory, they probably have a bit more overhead than NVIDIA, since they are going back through the PCIe controller to talk to the other card. But it's really, really hard to say without knowing more about how it works, or seeing it in action.

 

[Genx87]

After everyone got into the game, ATi than had to accept a major downfall in popularity as their overall reputation was taken away from them

While this may be true. I dont think Nvidias SLI had much to do with it. Maybe the 8 month delay on getting top end parts in sufficient quantity?

 

[Genx87]

In theory, they probably have a bit more overhead than NVIDIA, since they are going back through the PCIe controller to talk to the other card.

I would think going through the controller would be a bad decision and hamper performance. Right now I believe the only SLI solution in the channel is Nvidia NF4 which has two PCI slots but when both are used I think they are reduced to 8x lanes. 8x lanes provides a few GBs tops for bandwidth. That wouldnt be enough bandwidth to sustain high performance IMO.

I would think something like Nvidia proporietary solution would provide much more bandwidth.

 

[LTC8K6]

ATI hasn't had a major downfall in popularity or even a minor one over SLI.

Nor would they if they never introduced it, imo.

 

[SneakyStuff]

Originally posted by: Architect
Not long ago, nVidia amazed the public with their latest gimmick to improve their sales and overall gaming performance with SLI. SLI is in other words gave the user the ability to use two VGA's at the same time, allowing them to share their performances to give you a much higher overall performance of ~90%, which dramatically increased performances in games but a large significant amount.

After everyone got into the game, ATi than had to accept a major downfall in popularity as their overall reputation was taken away from them, unable to keep up with the Dual-VGA market. Until now, ATi's new Mutli-Rendering technology, much like SLI's equivalent, will; or has stormed the world, reclaiming their title.

Will this compare with SLI??
Any comments?? Suggestions or beliefs??

Who honestly cares? How many people do you know that have SLI? (and people on anandtech DON'T count ) It's not like either solution, from ATI or nVidia will be or already is affordable/practical for the vast majority of their consumers.A company's gain isn't measured by selling to its enthusiast market, and those are the people that buy SLI or this "MR". It's amazing how many integrated graphics solutions Intel sold last year wasn't it? What i'm getting to here is that ATI never had a downfall in popularity because of SLI, and nVidia won't have any downfall in popularity based on "MR".

 

[LTC8K6]

That's what I said.......

 

[SneakyStuff]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
That's what I said.......

lol how right you are, I meant to quote the very first post. But i'm glad we agree

edit: fixed!

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Genx87

In theory, they probably have a bit more overhead than NVIDIA, since they are going back through the PCIe controller to talk to the other card.

I would think going through the controller would be a bad decision and hamper performance. Right now I believe the only SLI solution in the channel is Nvidia NF4 which has two PCI slots but when both are used I think they are reduced to 8x lanes. 8x lanes provides a few GBs tops for bandwidth. That wouldnt be enough bandwidth to sustain high performance IMO.

I would think something like Nvidia proporietary solution would provide much more bandwidth.

How much friggin' bandwidth do you think they need? 8x PCIe is ~1GB/sec. each way. And it's not like today's graphics cards are hurting for (system) bandwidth -- there's essentially zero performance difference from AGP 4X (which is slower than PCIe x4) all the way up to PCIe x16.