Gigabyte's Dual-GPU Graphics Card

kamerononfire writes "Tom's Hardware has an article on a new dual-GPU graphics card, to be released Friday, by Giga-byte: "According to sources, the SLI card will lift current 3DMark2003 record revels by a significant margin while being priced lower than ATI's and Nvidia's single-GPU high-end cards.""

Drivers?

[BWJones]

So, the question will be: Can we get drivers for this card that will work in Linux or OS X? It is based in Nvidia technology, so presumably one could write drivers for this card unless Gigabyte is keeping their stuff proprietary.....

It looks interesting and I would certainly be more than interested in plugging one into my dual G5, but I don't have time (or the interest) to write my own drivers.

Deja Voodoo

[PurpleFloyd]

As I recall, 3dfx used multi-GPU chips for its Voodoo 4 and 5 lines, and didn't do so well. Is there anything to indicate that this card will do better? After all, sticking with SLI and multicore technology after its prime was what killed 3dfx and allowed Nvidia to take its place; it'd be rather ironic to see Nvidia go down the same path.

Article title misleading

[caerwyn]

The article title at Tom's Hardware is a little misleading. This is certainly *not* the first graphics card with two chips on it- back in the days of the ATI Rage chips, ATI had a Rage Fury MAXX that used two chips to render alternate frames.

like siamese weightlifters...

[infiniter]

this reminds me of the voodoo2 cards. clearly we have hit another speedbump in video technology development, and if history serves as a good model we'll have to see a real revolution in architecture rather than speed before we can start moving away from brute-force improvement again.

Re:Deja Voodoo

[supabeast!]

3DFX died not because of SLI, but because they put all the R&D funding toward anti-aliasing low resolution (640x480, 800x600) graphics. By the time they had it working well, Nvidia was producing chips that ran the same games just fine at 1024x768 and up with better texture filtering, which looked much better than anti-aliased low-res graphics.

The idea of slapping multiple chips on a card, or using multiple cards is still a good one, as long as the cards come out before someone else does something better with one chip.

The V2 did not have triangle setup.

[i41Overlord]

I had one. It had no triangle setup. Nvidia was the first to come out with on-board triangle setup.

Re:Gigabyte Dual Architecture

[default luser]

Gotta second that, the GA-KNSNXP-939 was nothing but trouble, would refuse to run paired DDR 400 sticks at anything higher than 333, single-channel.

Damn thing also didn't support Cool 'N Quiet properly.

The sad thing is a board that was $50 cheaper ended up doing all of the above without batting an eye, and now I'm happy with my Asus A8V.

I sure hope Gigabyte makes better video cards...I personally wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole.

Re:Drivers?

[BigBuckHunter]

Nvidias CURRENT 6629 linux drivers already support SLI.

BBH

Re:Deja Voodoo

[RipTides9x]

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. The voodoo 4 and 5 series was NOT a last ditch effort.

The design that became the Voodoo4 & 5 series was in development from the moment the Voodoo 2 series was released. The SLI design on one card was the promise. But the design became a victim of feature creep and got held up in development for well over 3 years. (T-Buffer, first card to do usuable FSAA)

By the time it was released the 3D market (Nvidia) had already Leap-Frogged them (Transform and Lighting on chip), management had continually overspent on advertising (over $15 million in one year alone, which was big big money for a graphics company then) and basically run the company into the ground (buying their own graphics card production facilities in Mexico vs. being a chip maker).

They were quickly running out of money to continue development on anything else. Had nothing else they could hope to release in 6 months time as Nvidia was doing then with its refreshes. Also, Nvidia was looking at losing a big patent suit brought by 3dfx against them. So the obvious happened.

Re:Quad-GPU via Dual-Core, Dual-Card SLI

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, but no card like this is made for PCI-X ... i think you mean PCIe .. which is PCI Express... PCI-X is PCI Extended, they are NOT the same thing

Great availability

[haraldm]

"The card is cooled by two on-board fans." Suuuper. Really cool. Statistically, one out of two fans will fail twice as often as a single fan. In other words, the MTBF is halved, while the noise is raised by 3 dB. And the assembly doesn't exactly look like you can easily replace the fans by aftermarket fans. I wonder how this spiffy card performs when one of the GPUs blows up. But maybe the PCB has some predetermined breaking points to punch out a blown GPU. This will also reduce the blue light by 3 dB. Bad for gamers.