Nividia - Refresh & and 3-way SLI

Seen this at neowin.net

"Nvidia Corp. not only plans to refresh its lineup of performance graphics accelerators this year, but also intends to introduce its 3-way SLI multi-GPU technology aiming extreme performance enthusiasts. But will the new triple SLI technology truly become a high-performance solution, or will share the destiny of Nvidia quad SLI?



http://news.expreview.com/2007-09- [...] d3763.html
According to a slide published by Expreview web-site, which is presumably from Nvidia Corp.’s roadmap, 3-way SLI is Nvidia’s new “ultimate gaming platform”, which will offer ultimate performance in three-dimensional games. ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, also plans to offer 3-way CrossFire multi-GPU technology, however, one of the graphics processing units (CPUs) in such configuration will be able to compute physics effects in case the game supports this capability.

Initially Nvidia plans to enable triple SLI support for the top-of-the-range GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra graphics cards, however, eventually it may support 3-way configurations of other GPUs as well. Systems with three graphics cores will be powered by Nvidia nForce 680i as well as nForce 780i platforms with the former supporting PCI Express 1.1/1.0a, whereas the latter featuring PCI Express 2.0 along with a special “BR04” switch for more efficient multi-GPU operation.

Exact capabilities of 3-way SLI platforms were unclear at press time. However, the exact feature set will mostly depend on driver support. Besides, performance boosts over single- or dual-GPU configurations will also depend on drivers. Back in 2006, when Nvidia unveiled its 4-way SLI technology, actual systems featuring four GPUs could not offer leading performance in all games due to poor drivers. Currently quad SLI technology is not supported for Windows Vista and customers who paid over $1000 for graphics cards alone have to take advantage of only two GPUs instead of four.

Nvidia did not comment on the news-story."


http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video [...] 60719.html

lol...costly stuff...and not to forget a power hog.

I would like to see the benchmarks for those, just to see if there is a reasonable gain in performance. There is no way I would get three of them... I am questioning 2 right now, but I am also looking at maybe just water cooling my videocard and then just overclocking it...

Maybe they are just trying to get close to god... the holy trinity.... or not.

3 High end video cards and no room for a good sound card?

You don't understand the point of SLI then. What resolution do you run your games at? Most of the people that run SLI run their games at 2560 x 1600 or 1920 x 1200 and this is where SLI makes the biggest different, and with an FPS difference of more than 25-35. Why bother with SLI when you run your games at 1280x1024?

gwolfman SLI generally shows a ATLEAST a 70% performance increase at any resolutions aslong as your CPU isnt bottlenecking it, so you're both wrong.

Since the pre-render limit is 3, this should still give some decent improvement. Maybe 2 will prerender while one will do AA and stuff?

if your lucky you ll probably have 2 or 3 more hurricanes down there in the states next year

ok my 2 cents worth........
going by my system i play games @1920x1200 max settings with one 8800gtx and i get 35-90fps in all my games i play. i dont even see the point of getting two let alone three i dont see any diff what so ever between 35 or 70fps
i truly dont get it. Has any one heard of the saying .....BRAINWASHED OR CON JOB. OR "VISTA" opps i coundnt resist lol.

Hatman

true true, then i start downgrading specs eg: shadows antx16 to 8 then 4 then 2 then off then i just upgrade my vid card again

Well thats a load of crap for starters because 2x 512mb doesnt "effectibly" make 1gb, its "effectivly" 512mb.

Personally I'm not a fan of Xfire/SLi, but to me the major benefit is for large panels to SMOOTH OUT the MIN fps.

Now the thing is with the GX2 experience it is surprising that they can't get SFR+AFR mode or 4 way SFR to work as it requires less read ahead.

I'm very interested in seeing Quad Xfire and if they can get super-tiling to work or not?

yes, people, Don't forget what ended up happening to quad sli, it died a horrible death, good concept, but nvidia and m$ didn't support it

SLI doesnt double the system memory (that is 512mb + 512mb=1gb) instead if you are running @ 1920x1080 one card is rendering 2073600 pixels and all 512mbs are being used for all those pixels, now if you add SLI, you cut the cards rendering in half so now that same card and same 512mbs are only rendering 1036800 pixels each... making it a lot easier and allowing the cards to do there jobs that much quicker...

Screw triple SLI, what about the refresh people?? THE REFRESH!!?

As much as I want to buy two more 8800GTXs, I don't see this being any more successful than Quad SLI. On the other hand, now that I've seen how the Crysis beta gives my 8800GTX a beating, maybe a few more wouldn't be such a bad idea...

Speaking from someone who already has two GTX's SLI and actually can "see" the benefits of SLI, I don't understand why one would need another Ultra or GTX for Physics rendering alone. I would think two GTX's or Ultras and one GTS 640 or 320 for physics would suffice?

look at all the room for the cards to breathe...

An entire system of video cards......

It would be nice if NVidia/ATI would have two GPU's on one card as a standard, don't know why either of them have done this and stuck with it. NVidia only did this once.

NVIDIA thinks that they will make more money this way which they will not.

I agree with Ape that SLI is basically for the eye candy on 24" and bigger screens plus high resolutions like 1920x1200.

Wasnt 2 8800GTX pretty much enough? Sometimes I think 3 might bring down the FPS since we will have to see latencies.

I FIGURED IT OUT!!!

You know how AMD is coming out with their tri-core! This is a way for them to keep up with AMD! THE HOLY TRI-GPU!!!

The only problem is that they are not under the same heat spreader, cost to much, generates to much heat, no airflow, makes me want to kick puppies, and I don't think there is a power supply large enough to handle 3 GTX or 3 ULTRA'S.

Might this rein in the era of dual power supplies for the retardly rich and not so famous?