Nvidia Readies New “Ultimate” Technology for Gamers.
Triple SLI – Nvidia’s Next-Generation Ultimate Gaming Platform
Category: Video
by Anton Shilov
[ 09/28/2007 | 04:09 PM ]
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?
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.
