NVIDIA Do-It-Yourself Quad SLI Launched

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.

Rediculous

[The_Pariah]

And this caters to less than 1% of the PC gamer market?

Re:I'd stab someone

[Matthaeus]

So you'd also go out and start punching people who have really nice home theatre systems? After all, spending that kind of dough to watch movies is sorta asking for it too.

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.)

Re:Rediculous

[oskard]

Doesn't matter, nVidia needs to showcase that they're at the forefront of GPU technology. Its a type of advertisement, word of mouth stuff. Consumers that hear about this will automatically link the best video cards to nVidia's product line.

Re:I'd stab someone

[sanborn's man]

Stop punching and think this kind of people do a great service to us. If those "punters" doesn't exist, surely the most powerful card you could buy today will be a S3 Virge 3D. Companies go ahead with new innovations because they know there will be always people spending insane amounts of money just to have the "greatest" and the "latest". Or you really think companies will develop a product as fast knowing they couldn't market it until it could be affordable to the mainstream? So don't punch them and think instead they are subsiding your next great video card ;-)

Not particularly useful against a lower resolution

[mobby_6kl]

Most of the comments thus far are replies to some jealous asshole, so I'll try to steer this back on topic.

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.

Re:Doing It All

[BigDumbAnimal]

You said 3dfx, but you meant SGI. How would 3dfx code hurt them? They own all of 3dfx's assets.

Re:Doing It All

[kimvette]

This has been addressed before. nVIDIA cannot open up the source to their drivers because of source code included from their 3DFX acquisition. They have stated time and time again, they would LOVE to open it up, but they legally cannot.

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 (but include no reference to any of the "licensed" code), then have them reengineer the drivers from scratch. There you have it, now legally clean drivers they own outright and can "legally" GPL.

Re:Doing It All

[Chirs]

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:Rediculous

[KingMotley]

Oh well. I'm in that 1%, so it's useful to me. Dell alone is selling some 4000 240xFPW monitors a week, that alone comes pretty close to 1% of the total PCs sold. That doesn't include the 30" that dell and apple sell, nor any other 1920x1200 resolution monitors from other manufacturers.

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 more with the PR of being known as the fastest/best).

Yes you can, but why?

[Tycho]

Sure you can do Quad-SLI, but why? Most games are CPU limited rather than GPU limited. What is becoming more and more important for many gamers is the image quality and nVidia loses in convincingly in all cases. The ATI X1k series can do angle independent anisotropic filtering which improves image quality. However, the nVidia 7900 series is stuck with angle dependent anisotropic filtering, which produces quantitatively worse image quality. Both ATI cards in Crossfire mode and nVidia SLI cards have high quality Anti-aliasing modes, however Crossfire AA modes actually are playable unlike the nVidia 16x and 32x AA modes which are in practice unsuable because of low frame rates. I could go on about the reasons why nVidia cards are just not as good as ATI cards and why Quad-SLI is kind of useless so I will just list a few more problems that nVidia cards have. No HDR+AA, inferior texture filtering, driver settings tricks just to get the output to look equivalent to ATI cards, texture shimmering with AA, and lower performance in general.

It's nice how you make and break the argument

[drachenstern]

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 though: will this work on Linux, and what boards offer four PCI-E x16 slots?

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 ...).

Two, you know the hardware is going to work with the operating system and vice versa out of the box. The same reason why you would tell a family member to purchase a laptop/notebook/ultraportable from Dell/HP/Gateway/Lenovo/Whomever, so you don't have to support it for everything.

Now, my question is this, does the quad-pci board allow you to run two sets of duo-sli cards instead of one quad-sli or one duo-sli? Any graphics gurus?

Re:Rediculous

[Hoi Polloi]

You left out the cost of air conditioning your room after you put 4 of these space heaters in it.

Re:Rediculous

[rtaylor]

And this caters to less than 1% of the PC gamer market?
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.