Nvidia is releasing their new technology called SLI (scan line interleave) meaning two Nvidia cards (two 6800’s :drool: .) can be used together on one motherboard.
Six years ago, if you’d mentioned the three letters SLI to a gamer, you would have been greeted with wide eyes and wild excitement. Why? SLI (scan line interleave) was a new concept that promised no less than improved gaming performance and playable frame rates at what was then an unheard of 1024x768 resolution with a Z-buffer enabled by combining the rendering power of two Voodoo 2 add-in cards. Since then, we haven’t seen anything of the sort commercially available.
ok correct me if im wrong but was not this already the techonology Alienware used and raved about? or was this a joint thing between the two big companies?
later on they state the similarities to Alienware… but Toms hardware says there are differences
PC builder Alienware also presented a working dual-card solution of its own at this year’s E3, although it differs from NVIDIA’s SLI in several points.
Wow this is some sweet stuff man, I might acctually make me want to get another PC for some gaming stuff.
yeah i read the article, sounds pretty promising. I was wrong in saying its a new technology because they had it way back when Voodoo’s where around, i actually had one of the cards but without the 2nd card, but i always had the availability to just buy the card and throw it in there (never did though)
The new aspect to it, is the combining of pci express and the technology, which is similar to Alienware’s. one card renders the top while the other renders the bottom, but what nvidia are boasting are variable performance rendering (or similar… lol) which is basically the computer deciding how much percentage one card should take of the screen , the example they used was a shooter like unreal. the more processing stuff would be the the hands and guns at the bottom of the screen and the rest would be static sky or simplier gemoetry, so it would calculate that the bottom would need one card to render specifically that 20 -30 percent of the screen and let the other card render out the rest.
might be a while before its commercially used, i can see this being used for industrial reasons (renderfarms , 3d, motion graphics…etc…) pretty much as soon as its released.
Something to really look forward to i say, and this may actually put Ati in a deep hole.
