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News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 5)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 07/09/2004 | 04:52 PM ]

NVIDIA SLI: a Technology to Stay or Last-Minute Decision?

NVIDIA’s Scalable Link Interface and Symmetric Multi Rendering announcement struck like a storm: nobody had leaked any details concerning this possibility before the launch and nobody could tell anything in addition to what NVIDIA indicated in its statements for media. Since secrets are not kept really well these days, such situation is a bit strange.

Performance at Any Cost!

NVIDIA’s Scalable Link Interface, dubbed SLI, is a set of hardware and software capabilities that allows two PCI Express x16 graphics cards to work in parallel and deliver higher performance compared to one such graphics card would. With the announcement of the technology that requires a special mainboard and an extremely powerful PSU along with two graphics cards NVIDIA sends a clear message to the world that says “performance at any cost”.

Two GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards

Neither NVIDIA, nor ATI Technologies could demonstrated an overwhelming performance advantage with the latest GeForce 6800 Ultra and RADEON X800 XT graphics processors. Sometimes the GeForce 6800 Ultra leads, sometimes, especially in cases when full-scene antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled, ATI’s offering beats the rival. Two NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards will deliver unbeatable performance, at least unless ATI announces similar technology. Moreover, dual graphics cards will deliver strong performance in professional applications, something that NVIDIA needs to address the very high-end of the market.

When announced, NVIDIA said the new technology will be available in Fall for desktops and immediately for workstations. For some reasons, no first-tier workstation vendors announced support for Scalable Link Interface and Symmetric Multi Rendering technologies immediately.

Mainboards Question

Initially power-hungry users will have to buy workstation components or special workstation or gaming machines to enjoy the power of two GeForce 6-series graphics cards. Desktop chipsets available this Summer and Fall from Intel, VIA Technologies and Silicon Integrated Systems are unlikely to support two PCI Express x16 ports for graphics cards. The only core-logic that has support for PCI Express x16 + PCI Express x8 ports is Intel’s E7525 also known as Tumwater designed for workstations. The core-logic itself costs $100, which leads to assume that mainboards based on the chipset will be priced in the range of $350 to $500 or even higher.

Intel E7525 Mainboard

A more user-friendly option from the price point of view will be brought by NVIDIA itself in the fourth quarter of the year. The company will release its NVIDIA nForce4 chipset that will sport two slots for PCI Express graphics cards and will be compatible with the desktop infrastructure, meaning significant cost reduction compared to the Intel Xeon platforms. In case NVIDIA succeeds, end-users will be able to get desktop computer at desktop price-point with one GeForce 6-series graphics card and add another card in future. The only thing end-users should be worried about is powerful and quality PSU.

However, it is pretty interesting to note that mainboard makers got the information about the nForce4 peculiarities at the day of the SLI announcement.

“We do not know exactly what the nForce4 is. NVIDIA wants us to make this, we would like too, but we are not sure about the specs of the product. That was a news for us when we were told that the chipset is set to run two graphics cards,” a spokesperson for a mainboard maker said wishing to remain anonymous.