Back in April, Nvidia's Tom Peterson revealed that the company was officially supporting SLI on motherboards playing host to AMD's 9-Series chipsets. Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI were said to be among the first motherboard manufacturers to offer SLI support, with others arriving shortly.
"Long term gamers probably remember that for a long time AMD offered great high-end CPUs, but in recent years, AMD’s stature as the preferred gaming CPU fell by the wayside and Intel CPUs have been the gamers’ choice," Petersen explained. "For this reason, we’ve only licensed SLI for motherboards with Intel chipsets. We’ve been recently hearing chants of 'SLI for AMD CPUs,' and figured that now is a great time to do it."
Following the post, SLI-certified motherboards with AMD's 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets began to appear on store shelves and online retailers, but the coveted feature still remained "locked" due to a lack of compatible drivers. That has now changed with the release of Nvidia's new GeForce 275.50 beta drivers, available starting Monday (release note - PDF)
As indicated, the new driver enables SLI technology on SLI-certified motherboards with AMD's 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets. The new driver set also improves 3D Vision performance with Duke Nukem Forever with 3-way SLI and Quad SLI technology.
"With Release 275 drivers, the 3D Vision Controller driver is now included with all GPU driver installations," the notes read. "This driver package includes v275.33 3D Vision Controller driver. Users are no longer required to install a separate 3D Vision Controller driver or CD driver. For more information, please view this knowledgebase article for more information."
New 3D Vision game profiles were also added to the beta release including the Duke Nukem Forever demo, the Mars benchmark, Rise of the Immortals and Rusty Hearts. The Alice Madness Returns profile was also updated with a rating of "Good."
