Originally posted by: Rollo
The ones that can benefit from SLI, nV does profiles for.
Does that imply that the games that NV doesn't create "SLI profiles" for, aren't usable or worth running in SLI mode?
Originally posted by: Rollo
That's why I factored it into the costs above. If you do have an SLI motherboard, 6800GT's are still significantly more expensive than X800XL's, but I agree that a 6800GT PCIE wouldn't be a bad choice. At least you will get decent performance on non-SLI games.
You keep coming back to this "non-sli games" stuff. What games are those?
And when it doesn't work - you get 6600GT performance, which is better than the 9800XT but significantly worse than any X800/6800.
Here you are again, back at your phantom, straw man point: "the games that don't work".
:roll: Like I said before, which are those, and who cares about some off beat games few buy that don't tax your card anyway?
I just wanted to point out, that for the average consumer, if something doesn't work
out of the box, then it "doesn't work". So that means that all of the other games other than the ones that NV choose to write "SLI profiles" for, "don't work".
Sure, if I buy XYZ hardware that is made by ABC OEM mfg, and XYZ doesn't have driver support for my chosen OS, but I know that I can get the ABC OEM drivers, and hack the .INF file to added the PnP device-id string, in order to install that device under my chosen OS... well, in contrast, to the average consumer who doesn't know how to hack config files (that are not intended to be user-modified), then that device "doesn't work" under that OS.
In other words, does Nvidia offer a GUI as part of their driver set, to auto-detect and allow the user to choose to enable games for SLI? Or do you have to go around hacking low-level config files on your own? If it's the latter, then I think that someone would be fully justified in saying that NV SLI "only supports 84 games" (or however many).
My person take on SLI? (Regardless of NV, actually, even if ATI were also currently offering a multi-card SLI-like solution.)
Outside of the specialized workstation content-creation market, it's worthless to your average consumer. (But definately NOT worthless to the company that produces them - if they can convince consumers through marketing propeganda that they "need" SLI, then that means that the video-card company can charge a premium for "SLI"-capable hardware.)
But in the long run, in terms of overall price/performance efficiencies, SLI/multi-GPU solutions are much
poorer than single-card/GPU solutions. (For example, look at the ATI Rage MAXX, as compared to a TNT2. The multi-GPU solution was variously expensive, wasteful, slow, incompatible, as compared to a slightly-more-modern single-GPU solution.) Multi-GPU solutions being designed and sold to the general consumer market, are purely because of either lagging R&D/development on a faster single-GPU solution, or because the company wants "bragging rights" over their market competition, based on unrealistic and unachievable theoretical performance numbers.
The exception for the workstation market is that for them, price is not really an objection, they want as much power as possible, period. For them, SLI is indeed a benefit, in terms of raw available power, compared to a single-card/GPU solution. Many higher-end workstation graphics solutions, for years before NV even existed as a company, were based on multiple-chip solutions. 3DLabs Glint/Delta/Gamma solutions were some of the most well-known ones.
PS. I mis-spoke earlier, I was speaking of multi-chip, not multi-core (on a single chip) solutions when I mentioned 3DLabs. Their usual Glint MX + Delta or + Gamma solution, included two rendering chips, and one geometry-accelerator chip, and a pool of VRAM for the display frame-buffer, and seperate pools of DRAM for texture/geometry data. It was quite an advanced solution for it's day. The card that I got to play around with, was a monsterous full-length PCI card solution, with chips covering both sides of it. It also made my NT4 OpenGL screensavers absolutely fly, since it implemented nearly the whole OpenGL pipeline entirely in hardware.
Likewise - on my future purchases, I don't want to have to be forced to pay an "SLI tax", just because some company got behind on their R&D and decided to implement multi-GPU stop-gap measures for the consumer market. (I mean, can you imagine, if instead of developing and selling the Pentium CPU, Intel instead pushed for 2-way and then 4-way 486 systems - not for business servers, but for home consumer systems?? Insane!) Yet, that is exactly what is going on right now in the video-card market. There are far too many people apparently, with more money than sense, buying these things. There's no purpose, and no need for it, IMHO.
Where were all of you current (NV) SLI fans, when the S3 Virge with 2MB of EDO DRAM was king of the consumer PC 3D-accelerator market? Why weren't you all drooling over $1500 3DLabs Glint-based 3D solutions, and upgrading from Win9x to NT Workstation just to play your 3D games? (Ok, lack of API support other than OpenGL was a factor, but still.) The consumer 3D market right now is ... insane. Literally.