sli

Should You Buy 3-Way SLI?

4:00PM Logan Booker | We had a taste of NVIDIA’s borderline-ridiculous option for performance enthusiasts a few months back. The results of this fearsome hardware configuration? A 33% increase in frame rates for Crysis on its higher settings. Sure, it’s nice to play Crysis at its sexiest, but not for such a premium price. Now Legit Reviews has a more in-depth look at the setup running Call of Duty 4, STALKER and Call of Juarez, all tested at 2560 x 1600. More »

Upgrade Advice: Triple SLI?

12:30PM Logan Booker | If you saw last week’s post on triple SLI and were considering buying a motherboard with an nForce 780i chipset, I have one word for you. Don’t. Scalable Link Interface (SLI) technology is aimed at two markets – enthusiasts and pro overclockers. I know for a fact that a lot of enthusiasts can’t make extensive use of SLI because it’s just too damn expensive. Pro overclockers don’t really care about price, and most of the time the hardware is being provided free by the likes of Gigabyte and ASUS. More »

This Is What Triple SLI Looks Like

10:00AM Logan Booker | A team of utterly mad Germans over at PC enthusiast hardware site PCGH have got themselves three of NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 Ultras and plugged them into the one motherboard. Like I said, utterly mad. There’s no mention of which motherboard they’re using, but I’m assuming it’s a reference design from NVIDIA. The cards were paired with a quad-core Intel Q6850 and benchmarked using FEAR, Company of Heroes and Crysis. You’ll find a pretty graph with Crysis benchmarks after the jump. PCGH-Hands-on-Test: NVIDIA’s 3-Wege-SLI [PCGH, via Blue's News] More »

Vista Hotfix Improves SLI, CrossFire Performance

1:00PM Logan Booker | Well technically it’s multi-GPU, so if you’re running a working GeForce 7950 GX2 or one of those bizarre contraptions ASUS and Gigabyte use to put together, then this includes you as well. The patch, aimed at PCs running Windows Vista only, addresses a scheduling problem within the DirectX kernel. Here’s the technobabble, which I’ll attempt to decipher: A graphics processing unit (GPU) or part of a GPU link may incur a small scheduling latency on a new Direct Memory Access (DMA) packet. This is true if the DMA packet is submitted to the GPU that has previously run out of work and if another GPU in the linked configuration is very busy. In some scenarios, significant starvation of one or more GPUs in the linked configuration reduces the expected performance of an application. Essentially, it’s a load-balancing thing – the hotfix spreads the work evenly among the GPUs. It’s unclear whether this affects both Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 9 games – Microsoft hasn’t provided enough information to make a solid call. The link below is for the Knowledge Base article. If you want the hotfix, I’d suggest trying elsewhere (every couple of hours) or waiting for Service Pack 1. Graphics performance can be improved in certain multiple-GPU scenarios on a Windows Vista-based computer [Microsoft via GGMania] More »