Nvidia's Response to Early DIY Quad-SLI

Final Thoughts

The discussion began with a look at Quad SLI under the 91.33 beta driver that has been on Nvidia’s enthusiast site for a month, and the results we generated using it. The tests were questioned as "why use the driver ?" Well, the simple answer is that people could have done it themselves for a month already. That is if they had the $1,300 in graphics cards, $1,600 for a 30" panel, and the base system that would get the most out of Quad-SLI.

We did this experiment to show that the community could do Quad SLI on their own and gave some targets to test on their own. Are there issues with running four graphic processors ? The simple answer is yes. Nvidia manages applications with its profiles and some do better than others. Our hope is that the improvements in subsequent driver releases make the games faster, better looking and more enjoyable.

Nvidia suggests that users should run with higher AA levels with Quad-SLI. "We strongly recommend testing Quad-SLI at 8xSLI AA and 16xAF at 2560x1600, which works great in many games. If users want to run at lower resolutions and/or lower filtering levels with D3D applications, we suggest using 7900 GTX in SLI mode."

This is the logical sense for Quad. As the image quality levels go up, the number of frames per second drops and Quad SLI can flex its four biceps. Quad is not for everyone. Some people look at Quad-SLI as a Hummer H1. They see that it’s a huge vehicle, costs a lot and consumes a ton of gas compared to their hybrid or even sports car. Yes, Quad is not great at lower resolutions and image quality, but neither is a H1 doing stop and go driving or being caught in gridlock. Quad excels when the road is rough via high resolutions and image quality settings. If you give an H1 a wicked Buffalo snowfall or a Texan flash flood, it eats it up and asks for more. This is what Quad-SLI can do in the right settings.

That being said, we still want to see better performance across all disciplines. We understand that multiple processor configurations will get limited by the CPU at some point for various reasons, but Quad still has problems in places where it should be king.

In conclusion, Quad-SLI is still in its infancy, much like SLI and CrossFire were. It will take some time to work out the kinks and smooth the way for even more powerful solutions. We hope that time is soon and Nvidia comes up with more solutions to these limitations, because we all want to see more performance. The better the high end gets, the better it will get for the mainstream.

We will be testing the latest driver, which was released on Thursday, 91.45, and should be the next WHQL candidate. At that point we can do an "apples to apples" comparison between the releases to see where some improvements have been made. We know there is another driver in the making which should boost performance even further. Until that time, choose what best fits your needs.

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