New anand article on SLI performance

[fsstrike]

Dont know if this is a repost but,

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2258

The numbers actually look more impressive that I thought. Too bad they didnt have the Ultra or Ultra extreme though

 

[JackBurton]

Yep, SLI is pretty dang sweet with two 6800GTs! I too wish they could have gotten their hands on two Ultras. I think I'll be upgrading to the Asus NF4 board when it comes out.

 

[Insomniak]

Impressive numbers. Not the doubling Nvidia was talking about, but still, a 50%- 80% gain in most cases. With a bit of overclocking, you could probably double it.

I like how Anand points out that SLI is an upgrade feature, not a purchase feature.

Overall though, this is just one more reason to go Nvidia IMO. With a 6800GT, instead of paying top dollar for the next gen high end when it comes out, just through down midrange price and get nearly the same performance. This is a real bang for the buck deal NV has going.

My next system, coming this holiday season, will be an SLI capable board with a single 6800GT to start. In a year or so, we'll see about another one

 

[ZobarStyl]

People keep saying this is an upgrade path, but frankly so much of the results show that SLI on a modern processor is CPU bound by most measures, so to just upgrade your mobo to SLI will mean you need a mean overclock or a new CPU to really use it, so new CPU+2 cards seems like less of an 'upgrade path' and more of a 'new setup'. Just my 2 cents. Either way I want the dual PCI-E lanes in my next mobo for tri-monitor setups, so long live SLI so as to make it where you can have two decent GPU's in your rig.

 

[gururu]

the 6600GT, even in SLI mode, is still generally outperformed by a single 6800GT. At lower resolutions or with AA disabled, the performance of two 6600GTs would definitely be more similar to that of a single 6800GT

i wouldn't want to wait two years to get 6800GT performance. I'd rather just pay the price and get a GT today. two GTs is really the pudding. I'm a little diappointed because the 6600GT option was attractive.

 

[gobucks]

I was gonna get it as an upgrade path, too, but with MSI's boneheaded decision to axe the x1 slots, I think I'll pass. That's just stupid. I'll bite the bullet and be forced to replace my video card rather than have to miss out on all the cool PCIe sound cards, SATA-3 controllers, 10GB ethernet cards, and HDTV cards that will undoubtedly come over the next year or 2. I was really thinking of geting an MSI, but between this and the rumors of the K8T Neo lying about HTT speeds, I'm not so sure.

 

[McArra]

Those numbers look impressive....

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: ZobarStyl
People keep saying this is an upgrade path, but frankly so much of the results show that SLI on a modern processor is CPU bound by most measures, so to just upgrade your mobo to SLI will mean you need a mean overclock or a new CPU to really use it, so new CPU+2 cards seems like less of an 'upgrade path' and more of a 'new setup'. Just my 2 cents. Either way I want the dual PCI-E lanes in my next mobo for tri-monitor setups, so long live SLI so as to make it where you can have two decent GPU's in your rig.

Dual-core CPU's will "cure" the 'cpu-bound issue'.

Looks like everything's coming together for '05. Can't wait to see 2 nv50s in SLI (and ati's solution).

Looks like the sli naysayers have shut up.
good
:roll:

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: apoppin
Looks like the sli naysayers have shut up.
good
:roll:

:thumbsup:

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: ZobarStyl
People keep saying this is an upgrade path, but frankly so much of the results show that SLI on a modern processor is CPU bound by most measures, so to just upgrade your mobo to SLI will mean you need a mean overclock or a new CPU to really use it, so new CPU+2 cards seems like less of an 'upgrade path' and more of a 'new setup'. Just my 2 cents. Either way I want the dual PCI-E lanes in my next mobo for tri-monitor setups, so long live SLI so as to make it where you can have two decent GPU's in your rig.

Dual-core CPU's will "cure" the 'cpu-bound issue'.

Just as soon as all those multithreaded game engines come along (which they will eventually, but there really aren't any right now)... and AMD may be starting with multicore chips running at less than top-of-the-line speeds. I'm not sure that a DC A64 3000+ would beat a single 4000+/FX-55 even with a multithreaded game (although it would probably cost less).

However, being 'CPU-bound' is still a moot point, as you can just increase the resolution and IQ features until you're not CPU-bound anymore. Obviously with two 6800GTs you're going to be CPU-bound with anything less strenuous than Doom3 or FarCry at almost *any* settings, but I feel like once you're pushing 100FPS at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 8xAF, you have little to complain about (other than that you spent too much on your video cards if all you play is CS or Quake3).

Looks like everything's coming together for '05. Can't wait to see 2 nv50s in SLI (and ati's solution).

Assuming NVIDIA continues with SLI in their next-gen cards (although if they get the drivers working and it sells, they probably will).

Looks like the sli naysayers have shut up.
good
:roll:

It's still really only attractive at the high-end -- two 6600GTs doesn't exactly look like a winner here relative to a single 6800GT. It's marginally interesting as an upgrade option if you want to buy a single 6800GT now and another later -- but it all depends on how NV50 and R500 turn out and what happens to the NV40 supply and pricing.

Certainly the fact that it seems to work is a big plus for SLI, though.

 

[Gagabiji]

I like those numbers at 1600*1200.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: ZobarStyl
People keep saying this is an upgrade path, but frankly so much of the results show that SLI on a modern processor is CPU bound by most measures, so to just upgrade your mobo to SLI will mean you need a mean overclock or a new CPU to really use it, so new CPU+2 cards seems like less of an 'upgrade path' and more of a 'new setup'. Just my 2 cents. Either way I want the dual PCI-E lanes in my next mobo for tri-monitor setups, so long live SLI so as to make it where you can have two decent GPU's in your rig.

Looks like the sli naysayers have shut up.
good
:roll:

It's still really only attractive at the high-end -- two 6600GTs doesn't exactly look like a winner here relative to a single 6800GT. It's marginally interesting as an upgrade option if you want to buy a single 6800GT now and another later -- but it all depends on how NV50 and R500 turn out and what happens to the NV40 supply and pricing.

Certainly the fact that it seems to work is a big plus for SLI, though.

You are STILL missing the POINT: Let Anand explain it to you in his words (since you pick apart what i write):

But the important thing to keep in mind here isn't what you can do with two cheaper cards and SLI, but rather the upgrade potential SLI offers. Buying a $200 6600GT today and upgrading to another one several months down the road, at a potentially much lower price, is a great way of getting the performance you want today while at the same time having a cheap upgrade path for when tomorrow's games come out.

ok?

 

[Rage187]

I want one..




I mean two...

 

[Genx87]

105% increase in performance in far cry?

Now that is impressive!

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: apoppin
You are STILL missing the POINT: Let Anand explain it to you in his words (since you pick apart what i write):

But the important thing to keep in mind here isn't what you can do with two cheaper cards and SLI, but rather the upgrade potential SLI offers. Buying a $200 6600GT today and upgrading to another one several months down the road, at a potentially much lower price, is a great way of getting the performance you want today while at the same time having a cheap upgrade path for when tomorrow's games come out.

ok?

I read what he said. However, the LAST time there were SLI cards available (Voodoo2 SLI), the next-gen single-card solutions (GeForce, Voodoo3) beat it in terms of both price and performance. I really don't think it's going to be a good upgrade path to buy one 6600GT now and another one later; for the amount you're going to spend overall, you might as well get a single 6800GT (which looks to be faster in most cases) now, or to just sell the 6600GT next year and get an NV50/R500-based card (which might give you a better upgrade in terms of performance and/or features). I don't see NV40 prices falling fast or far enough to make the upgrade path worthwhile.

SLI's a very interesting technology, and it's great for folks who have a lot of bucks and want a lot of bang. The workstation segment will love it (if they can make the drivers stable). I'm just not seeing the upgrade argument -- unless NV50/R500 are horribly delayed or totally suck. If the new cards aren't a good deal, but drive down the prices on the older hardware, SLI looks attractive. If the new cards are vastly superior to the NV40/R400 ones, SLI doesn't look so good.

 

[BenSkywalker]

However, the LAST time there were SLI cards available (Voodoo2 SLI), the next-gen single-card solutions (GeForce, Voodoo3) beat it in terms of both price and performance.

Memory slipping? Riva128ZX, TNT, RagePro, the ATi XPert line, Intel's i740(which was the fastest combo 2D/3D board for a bit), 3Dfx's Banshee and the MatroxG200 all came out after the V2 SLI and got whipped hard by it(well, the TNT was close but that's all it was). V2 SLI maintained its lead well after the next gen of single cards came out including 3Dfx's own. The V2 SLI dominated the market for a very long time.

 

[Rage187]

My V2 sli whooped any V3.

 

[nitromullet]

What Mathias99 is saying is true, it simply doesn't add up as an upgrade option.

For instance, say the 9800Pro had been SLI configurable... When the 9800Pro first came out is was around $400, and by the time NV40 and R420 were introduced they were around $200. So, if you had gotten a 9800Pro early on and then added another one when the next generation you would have spent a total of $600 for a setup that could be manhandled by 6800GT, which goes for $400.

Another case, say you get a single 6600GT now for $200 and then say the price drops on them to $100 when the next gen cards come out. That would have you spending $300 for a setup that performs about as well as a then last gen 6800GT, which probably will run for $300 or less by the time the next gen comes out. Not to mention that NV50 and R500 cards will be available at that time, and there will most likely be a $300 option that performs better than either dual 6600GT's or a single 6800GT.

IMO, SLI is the way to go if you get dual 6800 series cards, which would yield very high performance. SLI (or SLI plans) only becomes interesting when a dual solution offers more performance that any single card on the market at the time of purchase of the first card, otherwise I would always go with the faster single card.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker

However, the LAST time there were SLI cards available (Voodoo2 SLI), the next-gen single-card solutions (GeForce, Voodoo3) beat it in terms of both price and performance.

Memory slipping? Riva128ZX, TNT, RagePro, the ATi XPert line, Intel's i740(which was the fastest combo 2D/3D board for a bit), 3Dfx's Banshee and the MatroxG200 all came out after the V2 SLI and got whipped hard by it(well, the TNT was close but that's all it was). V2 SLI maintained its lead well after the next gen of single cards came out including 3Dfx's own. The V2 SLI dominated the market for a very long time.

Maybe I'm not recalling all the details of the release dates -- I certainly couldn't tell you exactly when every one of those cards was put out. I thought at least that the TNT and Rage Pro were released pretty close to the Voodoo2 (and were thus part of the 'same' generation of chipsets). I'll see if I can find anything more detailed.

Edit: Still haven't been able to find any 'official' release date data for the cards around that time. THG did some benchmarking with the V2 SLI and some other 'new' cards a few months after the V2's release (August/September '98 -- the V2 appears to have come out in March/April '98): article. While the Voodoo2 SLI is faster than the G200, TNT, Voodoo Banshee, and Savage3D, it's not *that* much faster than the TNT. It also shows worse image quality (at least in Quake2), and is limited to 16-bit color and a maximum resolution of 1024x768.

Edit: Here's a THG article from March '99 (about 12 months after the release of the Voodoo2), showing a V2 SLI up against the V3 and TNT2. The SLI config loses to both the TNT2 and V3 3500 with a fast CPU (on the slower AMDs, the V2 SLI is better, though, at least in Quake2), and is *destroyed* in the AGP texturing demo, plus they comment again about the worse IQ compared with the TNT cards. article
It looks to me that, within a year of release, the V2 SLI was no longer the top performer, and it certainly didn't match up to even the TNT in terms of bang/buck.

Edit some more: here's an AT article from April '99 showing much the same thing -- the single V3 cards beat out the V2 SLI consistently, and the TNT2 is faster in some situations (the 'Crusher' Q2 demo, as well as across the board in D3D apps), and is close in the rest (at least with a fast enough CPU). Again the worse IQ of the Voodoo cards is mentioned.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Riva128ZX Preview at Tom's. The V2 SLI was out before the chip that preceeded the TNT. The TNT2 was the first NV chip that was really superior to the V2 SLI in terms of performance, that was nV's third release after the V2(the GeForce was fourth but that whipped every part 3dfx ever released, let alone 3Dfx).

For instance, say the 9800Pro had been SLI configurable... When the 9800Pro first came out is was around $400, and by the time NV40 and R420 were introduced they were around $200. So, if you had gotten a 9800Pro early on and then added another one when the next generation you would have spent a total of $600 for a setup that could be manhandled by 6800GT, which goes for $400.

If you increase the R9800Pro's performance by 60%-90% you are comparable to the performance levels of the X800Pro. Reality is that if you are already running a R9800Pro then you need to drop $200 in your scenario to be at that performance level or $400 for slightly faster performance. If the 6600GT was 90% of the performance of the 6800GT how many people would be paying for the 6800GT? Essentialy that is the situation you end up looking at. You tell me I can roughly double my performance for $400 or increase it by 75% for half of that and I'm going with the latter.

 

[Acanthus]

WHY OH WHY didnt they tell us what PSU they used?

I wanna know what it takes to run 2 6800GTs/Ultras.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: ZobarStyl
People keep saying this is an upgrade path, but frankly so much of the results show that SLI on a modern processor is CPU bound by most measures, so to just upgrade your mobo to SLI will mean you need a mean overclock or a new CPU to really use it, so new CPU+2 cards seems like less of an 'upgrade path' and more of a 'new setup'. Just my 2 cents. Either way I want the dual PCI-E lanes in my next mobo for tri-monitor setups, so long live SLI so as to make it where you can have two decent GPU's in your rig.

Wouldn't it be a "new setup" anyway if you need to buy an NF4 mobo? It would require a new processor anyways wouldn't it? This is of course if your going the AMD route which most people in here usually do.

 

[Killrose]

It will be interesting to see the final performance numbers on SLI once they get the grapic glitches cleared up. I guess it will either be way slower or way faster depending on what needs to be done to fix it.

 

[Rage187]

As soon as they release a Shuttle XPC 939 based on the Nforce4 w/ the ability to do SLI, I'm on it.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
Riva128ZX Preview at Tom's. The V2 SLI was out before the chip that preceeded the TNT. The TNT2 was the first NV chip that was really superior to the V2 SLI in terms of performance, that was nV's third release after the V2(the GeForce was fourth but that whipped every part 3dfx ever released, let alone 3Dfx).

I agree 100%. I'm just saying that claims that the V2 "dominated the market for a very long time" (your own words) are a bit misleading -- there were single cards running about 75% as fast as it within 6 months (at a much lower cost), and several cards beating it within 12 months (still at a lower cost). If you bought a single V2 at release, it would not have made much sense to upgrade with a second one 12 months later (by which time the Voodoo3 and TNT2 were available).

Rage187's claim that the V2 SLI "whooped any V3" is just flat-out wrong, given the benchmark results above. When not CPU-limited, the Voodoo3 and TNT2 were both faster than the Voodoo2 SLI.

Now -- will this be what happens this time around? That's still up in the air. If the next-gen parts (NV50/R500) don't show big performance increases over NV40/R400, SLI might actually make sense as an upgrade path. I'm just saying that, in the past, that was not the case -- and with the current supply issues with the NV40 and R400 cards, prices seem unlikely to drop dramatically over the next 12 months (so the new cards wouldn't have to show all that much performance gain to win out in terms of price/performance).

For instance, say the 9800Pro had been SLI configurable... When the 9800Pro first came out is was around $400, and by the time NV40 and R420 were introduced they were around $200. So, if you had gotten a 9800Pro early on and then added another one when the next generation you would have spent a total of $600 for a setup that could be manhandled by 6800GT, which goes for $400.

If you increase the R9800Pro's performance by 60%-90% you are comparable to the performance levels of the X800Pro. Reality is that if you are already running a R9800Pro then you need to drop $200 in your scenario to be at that performance level or $400 for slightly faster performance. If the 6600GT was 90% of the performance of the 6800GT how many people would be paying for the 6800GT? Essentialy that is the situation you end up looking at. You tell me I can roughly double my performance for $400 or increase it by 75% for half of that and I'm going with the latter.

But the case there would be "get 75% more performance for $200 or get double the performance for $400 minus whatever you can sell your 6600GT for". If you could get, say, $150 for your current card, you'd be choosing either 75% more performance for $200 or 100% more performance for $250. If you're going to discuss upgrade options like this, you have to take the resale (or reuse) value of your current parts into account.