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NVIDIA Do-It-Yourself Quad SLI Launched
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Aug 09, 2006 12:38 PM
from the what-to-do-with-a-second-mortgage dept.
from the what-to-do-with-a-second-mortgage dept.
Spinnerbait writes "Today, NVIDIA will be releasing their Forceware v91.37 drivers and with them will be officially endorsing Do-It-Yourself Quad-SLI. HotHardware has put together an article detailing the steps necessary to assemble and configure a high-end Quad-SLI rig, and they give some thoughts regarding XHD Gaming and its associated costs. Those of you that are hell-bent on gaming ultra-high resolutions (1920X1200 or 2560X1600 for example), along with the highest available image quality, might want to give one of these setups a look." Before making a purchase I would recommend building that water-cooled credit card first.
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Rediculous (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Rediculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Rediculous (Score:5, Informative)
It's called the halo effect [wikipedia.org] and is the tendency for positive or negative perceptions to spill over from one product to another.
Halo products usually cost an arm and a leg too.
Parent
Other markets (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Rediculous (Score:2, Insightful)
But ok, let's just assume it's 1% of the market. I don't know of any major company that wouldn't be willing to dedicate a couple programmers (if that) for a few weeks to possibly increase their sales by 1% (probably MUCH
Re:Rediculous (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. The triple cheeseburger at your local burger joint is the same way and exists for the exact same reason.
If a $1200 product is available, people can feel good about the money they saved by purchasing the $600 product and laugh at the people wasting their money on the bigger item.
If the $600 product is the top of the line then less people will buy it, they'll get the $300 item instead.
Re:Rediculous (Score:2)
Why blow money on an outdated (and yet current offering?) SGI workstation when you can get better performance out of a quad-(dual core) (8-way processing) PC? The question is
Re:Rediculous (Score:2)
Board with 4 PCI-E [slashdot.org]
I'm sure more boards will be out with it now that the driver support is there. I wouldn't throw a rig like that out of my room although I might need to upgrade my air conditioner. Coindentally I already need to upgrade the AC in my office. Amazing what passes for a datacenter these days.
Re:Rediculous (Score:4, Informative)
I can't say one way or the other about Linux (yet). You don't need four PCI-E x16 slots though. This is based around the nVidia 7950 GX2 [slizone.com], which connects two graphics processors to the motherboard via a single PCI-E slot. Each of those takes up two slots worth of space (in fact,it's two boards connected together) but the high-end single-GPU boards (e.g. 7900GTX, ATI X1900) do so as well. Most SLI motherboards leave quite a bit of room between their x16 slots, so the physical installation should rarely (if ever) cause a problem.
In case anybody cares: apparently during development, they did build a few dual-GPU boards that required two slots -- but they were never put into real production.
Parent
Re:Rediculous (Score:2)
The new Mac Pro has four PCIe x16 slots, and some built-to-order options have 4 nVidia GPUs. As far as I know, however, you will need to run something other than OS X to use SLI; Apple just advertise it as supporting 8 displays.
It's nice how you make and break the argument (Score:2, Insightful)
It's tremendously important to both note and keep in mind that the reason why any individual would purchase an SGI system is two-fold.
One, your department already runs SGI? Or the application that you want to run runs on IRIX (ya, so they support a linux kernel
Re:Rediculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
But can it run (Score:5, Funny)
And the server... (Score:3, Funny)
From what I've read so far however, unless you have a big screen HDTV that you game with that supports high resolutions with a fast response time and refresh rate(1% of the gaming market), you WILL NOT need the ultra expensive quad SLI.
I sold my wife and car, and I get my quad sli setup when it arrives in the mail tomorrow.
RE: I sold my wife and car... (Score:2, Funny)
Re: I sold my wife and car... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: I sold my wife and car... (Score:2)
Two are servers which host her mail and website.
Umm 91.45 Got Released Today (Score:4, Informative)
Windows XP/2000
ForceWare Release 90
Version: 91.45
Release Date: August 9, 2006
Please make sure to read the Driver Installation Hints Document before you install this driver.
U.S. English
File Size: 32.8 MB
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_91.45.html [nvidia.com]
Re:Umm 91.45 Got Released Today (Score:2)
Re:Umm 91.45 Got Released Today (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, this is a "Unified Driver." That means it has drivers for a huge variety of video cards in one big, tidy package. I also most likely includes stuff for multiple languages, only one of which you'll actually use. Also, with the 9x.xx release of nVidia drivers you get both the "new" display driver interface (based on a web browser motif) and the "classic" interface (what we all know and have loved for the last five years or more).
Add all that up and you get a 33MB installer. The actual driver code, however, is far smaller. Not all of that 33MB ends up on your hard drive after the install is done. It's not bloated, it's just aimed at a very wide array of possible applications, and nVidia wants to put all that in one installer to simplify things for the end user. Bloat implies there's a lot of cruft in there, and that's not the case.
Parent
Only on /. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Only on /. (Score:2)
Coral Cache mirror... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.hothardware.com.nyud.net:8080/printart
I'm still giggling about the fact that they called their site "hothardware".. It doesn't get any hotter than this!
Not particularly useful against a lower resolution (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been possible to do for a while now, although it required some effort. From the benchmarks I've seen, QuadSLI is almost counterproductive for resolutions at or below 1600x1200. It does have a reasonable advantage in FEAR, but most other games showed very little improvement. That review didn't cover the 1920 and 2560 resolutions, but that's where the advantage should be quite significant. Of course, whether it's worth it or not depends on how many more hours you'll have to spend flipping burgers to pay it off.
TFA on one page... (Score:2)
http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=856 [hothardware.com]
New hardware (Score:5, Informative)
that's dope (Score:4, Funny)
Pointless (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Funny)
Niz 123342,9987
Parent
If only there were Mac SLI... (Score:2)
Of course, having driver support for COTS video cards would be at least 60% better than that. Charging $150 for a card that's $90 retail, sheesh!
Latency: Serious Gamer Issue with AFR (Score:5, Informative)
On 4-way AFR the driver builds a display list and sends it to a GPU that isn't busy. It is possible to have all four GPUs busy (rendering frames) while the current frame is being displayed and a new display list is being generated by the CPU. This means what you see with 4-way full AFR can be up to 5 frames later than what is going on in the game engine. At 78.9 FPS, this can translate into nearly 64 ms of latency which is enough to get you killed if you're a serious gamer.
Serious gamers with Quad-SLI are going to want to use SFR (Split Frame Rendering) which cuts latency quite a bit but takes a performance hit to the FPS. There are definite inefficiencies to 4-way SFR with having all four cards render portions of the same scene vs 4-way AFR. You generate 4 times as much display list info (GPU fifo data) and you have to replicate more data and uploads (if textures don't fit into the 512MB memory) across the GPUs.
I'm not sure if the Quad-SLI supports an AFR/SFR hybrid where you can have 2X2 (2 GPUs working on SFR each in AFR queue) - this might balance the performance vs latency issue better.
Re:I'd stab someone (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got no problem with the early adopter crowd...they make things cheaper for the rest of us. If someone has that kind of disposable income, hey! More power to 'em!
(My sincere apologies if you were joking and I missed it.)
Parent
Re:I'd stab someone (Score:3, Interesting)
you could get some money out of it renting it for parties perhaps, opening a LAN-House, or even better you could build a hyper-resolution arcade [arcadecontrols.com] with it and resell it with profit!
It all depends on how much you see opportunity where others see entertainment....
Re:I'd stab someone (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'd stab someone (Score:3, Funny)
Props to anyone who can place the quote without Googleing.
Re:I'd stab someone (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I'd stab someone (Score:2)
Re:I'd stab someone (Score:2)
Re:I'd stab someone (Score:2)
Take my setup of two monitors I can run resolutions at 2560 x 1024 and 3200 x 2400, do I for gaming, no I stick to 1280 x 1024 but I could some people easily doing two projectors running at it if they got the cash to spend it.
Re:I'd stab someone (Score:2)
Re:Doing It All (Score:3, Informative)
That is miles more than ATI have provided for Linux. Hopefully when the NDA on the contract runs out we will see open drivers actively supported from nVIDIA.
Re:Doing It All (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Doing It All (Score:4, Informative)
ATI may not be brilliant, but at least they're putting some sort of effort behind their Linux drivers now.
They actually support XOrg 7.1 now, whereas nVidia don't yet (officially).
Parent
Re:Doing It All (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Doing It All (Score:2)
-theGreater
Re:Doing It All (Score:2)
That is what they do!
Re:Doing It All (Score:2)
Re:Doing It All (Score:3, Insightful)
Bull----. If they "acquired" 3DFX property, they OWN it. If they OWN the "IP" then there is NO legal issue blocking them from opening up the source.
However, if it is "licensed" (-sic), then they ought to set up a second engineering team, give them notes on the architecture (b
Re:Doing It All (Score:3, Insightful)
Contrary to vostok4's statement, it's not the 3dfx stuff that's the issue but rather the algorithms/code/etc. that was licensed from SGI.
As to the binary blob plus wrapper code comment, that's exactly what they have now. They could conceivably move more code out of the binary blob, but they probably don't see much benefit coming from that as the number of free software users that also need high performance 3D is fairly small.
Re:Doing It All (Score:2)
40% Flamebait
30% Interesting
30% Overrated
What kind of TrollMod thinks reasons for nVidia to open their drivers source is "Flamebait"? Or somehow "uninteresting"? Sounds more like they want Linux nVidia drivers to stay closed and bad. Or they're just the usual anonymous TrollMod abuse. Or both.