Nvidia 90 Series drivers may allow more than 2 cards for SLI

[Keysplayr]

Inquirer Linkage

Just thought this was a bit interesting. Performance would truly be astonishing if we had for example, 2 Gigabyte Dual 7800GT cards SLI'd. I mean, 80 pipelines, 28 vertex shaders units, and 512MB memory. I don't even want to think how much power this will draw and the heat it will generate. And I'm sure it will be quite pricey. But OH lordy!! The performance.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
Inquirer Linkage

Just thought this was a bit interesting. Performance would truly be astonishing if we had for example, 2 Gigabyte Dual 7800GT cards SLI'd. I mean, 80 pipelines, 28 vertex shaders units, and 512MB memory. I don't even want to think how much power this will draw and the heat it will generate. And I'm sure it will be quite pricey. But OH lordy!! The performance.

Those Gigabyte Dual 7800 GT's only have 256 MB of memory? I would have expected them to have 512 MB per card, making it a full 1 GB of video card memory if used in SLI

Thanks for the link, checking it out now.

 

[ArchAngel777]

N/T

 

[Keysplayr]

In regular mode, this card will only detect 256 MB of memory. In SLI mode, it will detect 256MB of memory for each core.
There is 512MB on the card. Cores are at 430 and memory is at 1.2GHz.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
In regular mode, this card will only detect 256 MB of memory. In SLI mode, it will detect 256MB of memory for each core.
There is 512MB on the card. Cores are at 430 and memory is at 1.2GHz.

So then you are looking at 1 GB of memory? Only reason I say is because the post said 80 pipelines, which was 4 X 20, and then I figured 4 X 256 = 1 GB. That is the only reason, so I didn't know if the Gigabyte card had only 128 per core, or if you meant to put in 1 GB? Thus 4 X 256 MB


Edit ** After looking at the link, some of those pictures were floating around here in another thread about 1 month ago. We were not sure if it meant Quad SLI or not... But it looks like this is semi-confirmed. Pretty cool if you ask me, but it just means I will be 3 more steps away from the performance I want :-/

 

[1Dark1Sharigan1]

Meh, even if it were true, 4x SLI is not exactly a great/efficient idea. Why not just do dual core x2? I really can't see nvidia doing something like this . . .

 

[Keysplayr]

Well, the article mentioned 2xDual GPU cards.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: ArchAngel777

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
In regular mode, this card will only detect 256 MB of memory. In SLI mode, it will detect 256MB of memory for each core.
There is 512MB on the card. Cores are at 430 and memory is at 1.2GHz.

So then you are looking at 1 GB of memory? Only reason I say is because the post said 80 pipelines, which was 4 X 20, and then I figured 4 X 256 = 1 GB. That is the only reason, so I didn't know if the Gigabyte card had only 128 per core, or if you meant to put in 1 GB? Thus 4 X 256 MB

The dual-7800GT card has 512MB total, with 256MB allocated (independently) to each GPU core. The way SLI works (at least today), the memory is not combined between cards/cores when they are working together; each maintains their own copy of geometry/texture data and all that (which is why they need to have the same amount of RAM). If they did enable "quad SLI" with two of these cards, each core would still only have 256MB of VRAM available to it.

Now, they *could* do things to allow sending/receiving data over the SLI link(s) (to implement shared memory between the cards), but unless that thing has *preposterously* high bandwidth, this is likely to simply bottleneck you even worse.

 

[Genx87]

Could be how they compete with the R580 until G80 shows up. Multi-core GPU solution for a combined 40 pipe, 16 vertex and 512MB of ram.

It appears the cores on the 7800s run pretty cool so they have options in the multi-GPU arena and the head start + knowhow to use it against ATI.

 

[moonboy403]

yea...we also need like 10 psu or one 1000watts psu with 100 amp on the 12v rail =D

 

[ArchAngel777]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: ArchAngel777

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
In regular mode, this card will only detect 256 MB of memory. In SLI mode, it will detect 256MB of memory for each core.
There is 512MB on the card. Cores are at 430 and memory is at 1.2GHz.

So then you are looking at 1 GB of memory? Only reason I say is because the post said 80 pipelines, which was 4 X 20, and then I figured 4 X 256 = 1 GB. That is the only reason, so I didn't know if the Gigabyte card had only 128 per core, or if you meant to put in 1 GB? Thus 4 X 256 MB

The dual-7800GT card has 512MB total, with 256MB allocated (independently) to each GPU core. The way SLI works (at least today), the memory is not combined between cards/cores when they are working together; each maintains their own copy of geometry/texture data and all that (which is why they need to have the same amount of RAM). If they did enable "quad SLI" with two of these cards, each core would still only have 256MB of VRAM available to it.

Now, they *could* do things to allow sending/receiving data over the SLI link(s) (to implement shared memory between the cards), but unless that thing has *preposterously* high bandwidth, this is likely to simply bottleneck you even worse.

Cool, thanks for the information, I keep learning more about SLI. So, then if someone had Quad SLI and each card had 256 MB, then you still only have a total of 256 MB? That is, if I understand what you have said correctly.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: ArchAngel777
Cool, thanks for the information, I keep learning more about SLI. So, then if someone had Quad SLI and each card had 256 MB, then you still only have a total of 256 MB? That is, if I understand what you have said correctly.

Effectively, yes. It would be like having a card with four times as many pipes, but the same amount of video memory, just like two-card SLI does not increase the effective amount of video memory.

 

[Sentry2]

Exactly, and that is why I'm selling my GTX's when the 512mb version arrives. The GTX should have never been a 256mb card... just my opinion though