SLI Video cards

[pcslookout]

I don't think SLI is worth it but when you go SLI say with 2 Geforce 8800 GTX or Ultra do you get double the amount of video ram total ? So instead of 768 MB of video ram you would get 1536 MB of video ram. Plenty for high FSAA and AF. Is this what make very high resolutions in SLI have very playable framerates minimum and average framerates even in the most power hungry games ?

 

[aka1nas]

No, all the textures and data has to be duplicated across both cards, so you don't have double the effective video RAM.

The high-end cards with lots of video memory and bandwidth are the only ones that scale well with SLI because they don't take the performance hit at higher resolutions and with AA/AF enabled that lower-end cards do.

128-bit cards that can't handle high resolution with AA well individually are not good candidates for SLI as you typically don't want to get twice the framerate at whatever resolution/settings were playable with that single crappy card, you would probably want to play at higher resolutions and crank up the eye candy, which those cards will fall flat on their face if you try to do so.

 

[pcslookout]

I can see why SLI is not worth it at all now. Better to just get a next generation nvidia video card thats just as fast or faster than a GTX or Ultra Sli setup and have the 1 GB to 1.5 GB of video ram instead as well so you can do all high settings , maximum FSAA and AF on 24" to 30" lcd native resolution!