Will SLI ever come back?

[AgaBoogaBoo]

I'm wondering if SLI or something of the sort will ever come back... that would make upgrades easier since I could just buy one more of the video card I have and add it on. I don't see any motherboards with dual AGP slots, but what about dual PCI Express slots?

 

[T9D]

..

 

[FacelessNobody]

I don't know if it has any technical limitations present today, but if it doesn't I'd sure like to see its return.

 

[BFG10K]

Single GPUs are fast enough without the extra costs involved in going with SLI. I don't forsee it coming back anytime in the near future.

 

[MDE]

No boards with dual AGP slots, so it's not really feasible. Maybe when PCI Express comes around someone might try it.

 

[bandana163]

I'd like some Dual V5-6000s...
Did you see their tests? A V5-6000 is between the GF2 Ultra and GF3 normal without Hardware T&L...

 

[Mingon]

Almost all current boards support sli, either by seperate card or by dual cores ala 5500. What we are seeing with the rv350 - r420 and the FX series is GPU's which have added units such as vertex shaders to increase performance.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Single GPUs are fast enough without the extra costs involved in going with SLI. I don't forsee it coming back anytime in the near future.

This is true, but also the fact that the old SLI boards (such as Voodoo2 SLI) those Voodoo2's were PCI video accelerators only and required another video card to piggy back on. Now a system has several PCI slots and would allow for such a thing as SLI. With current cards being more than fast enough for the majority of today's PC games, and systems only having one AGP slot (which in turn is vastly superior to a PCI slot for video card performance), you didn't really ever have the option to SLI because there was never another slot to plug in an identical board and therefore I don't think anyone ever truly considered such an option as SLI as you could have one AGP card do the same thing as two SLI PCI cards and which option do you think is cheaper for both the consumer AND the producer? That's right the single AGP. However, PCI X might be enough to tempt thoughts of SLI. Super hardcore gamers always want more and more performance, and if you can take a stand alone kick ass card and double it up with another stand alone kick ass card, the gamer pays twice as much and in theory gets twice the performance, while if the company can pull off SLI between two stand alone kick ass cards they don't lose much in the long run either depending upon how hard it would be to get SLI to work. I could see it happing just as much as I could see it not. Am I going to get excited over it? Well I probably won't get my self all hyped up just yet, I'm still very excited by what single cards can do today.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Single GPUs are fast enough without the extra costs involved in going with SLI. I don't forsee it coming back anytime in the near future.

Someone made a speculative statement on another forum "since we'll be seeing PCI express cards next year, we'll probably be able to have more than one vid card per system under the same bus.... and maybe nVidia can use the 3dfx SLI tech that they now own" any way that could come to be or was this just wishful thinking?

 

[Schadenfroh]

nvidia does not own SLI, Quantum3d does.

 

[Mingon]

nvidia does not own SLI, Quantum3d does.

Call it what you will, nvdia has a version of its quadro range the Quadro4 400NVS which has two x mx440 Pny version or elsa version

 

[Schadenfroh]

how about this bad boy
16 VSA100 and 1gb of graphics memory

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Originally posted by: Mingon

nvidia does not own SLI, Quantum3d does.

Call it what you will, nvdia has a version of its quadro range the Quadro4 400NVS which has two x mx440 Pny version or elsa version

That's not SLI though - that's simply driving 4 displays using two chips, there's no interleaving, scan-line or otherwise going on.

As far as modern-day SLI goes, I'm not convinced that you'd get anywhere near the benefits of using 2 voodoo 2s with todays cards. For two modern chips to render alternate lines of the same frame, they'd have to perform the exact same transform and lighting as well as vertex and pixel shader operation, since these things are done per-frame, not per scan-line. You might be able to squeeze twice the geometry performance, but you wouldn't gain any benefits in more advanced operations.

(disclaimer - I'm not enough of an expert to prove the above, if someone more knowledeable comes a long, feel free to correct me...)

 

[ethebubbeth]

actually, anyone here remember here remember the Ati Rage Fury Maxx or something along those lines... it was two rages on one card and instead of having each one render alternate scanlines, each did half the screen. Would that be more efficient than the SLI 3dfx setup? And agabooba, this whole thing start when i mentioned the possibility of pci express SLI in that voodoo 2 thread 😉 ?

 

[Schadenfroh]

Alternate Frame Rendering (found on the Rage Fury MaXX) works like this

ATI has developed a multiple chip parallel processing technique that works within MAXX implementation called Alternate Frame Rendering or AFR. In the AFR process, one chip renders even frames while the other chip renders odd frames. Each chip processes triangle setup for its own frame without waiting for the other chip making AFR the more efficient multiple chip processing technique

in theory it would be better than SLI, but SLI would probably support a larger number of chips

 

[ethebubbeth]

thanks schad i forgot how it worked exactly.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

In my theory, for SLI or something like that to come back in the near future to the gaming market, the cards that might end up supporting SLI will need to be able to sell as stand alone cards on their own. Maybe with PCI-X we may see something like it worm its way in. 9700 Pros and 9800 Pros have been more than accepted by gamers in the market, and the 5800/5900s aren't terrible solutions either (maybe a little over priced). Imagine being more than content with a single 9800 Pro only being able to double it up and boost your performance around say 80%? While $600-1000 for video cards may be a bit extreme, you would only have to pay half that to "get by" as you only need one of those kick ass cards in the first place, there are some gamers out there that want the performance and have the money to spend. But another good thing would be the ability to upgrade in the future, you could shell out $400 for a new card now, and when the drop down to $150 upgrade and get performance like new. Although that may pose a new problem as new flag ships might be passed up by hard core gamers usually willing to spend $400 yearly on new video cards in favor of just "upgrading" to an SLI solution. In that sense I don't know if it will happen or at least if it does the cards that support it may not drop in price as quickly as we're used to seeing 😕

 

[bluemax]

I'd love to see a scalable setup:

First card can be AGP *or* PCI, doesn't really matter.
Second and up card would pretty much have to be PCI.

It would work better if it were sold as a primary/secondary setup. "Primary" card has the VGA output plugs/TV/DVI/whatever. "Secondary" card would not have outputs and would not need any SLI cables or VGA pass-throughs. Plug it in and it goes, you get 50-100% performance gain.

It can be done, the Matrox M3D card didn't require any video cables or pass-throughs, just design it to use multiple processors as they come in.


I'd love to see that.