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Nvidia Officially Unwraps 3-Way SLI Technology.

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov

[ 12/13/2007 | 03:11 PM ]

Nvidia Corp. on Thursday officially announced its 3-way multi-GPU technology dubbed triple-SLI. The tech, which tries walking in the shoes of quad-SLI that failed to offer any serious advantage, promises to get video games on the PC to a whole new level by improving performance by nearly three times over a single graphics card.

Nvidia’s 3-way SLI technology allows three Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra or Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards to work in unison in order to bring framerates that were never seen before in modern video games, according to claims made by Nvidia Corp., the world’s largest supplier of discrete graphics processing units (GPUs). In addition, customers will have to own a personal computer (PC) based on Nvidia 680i SLI core-logic that supports three PCI Express slots for three graphics boards.

“The new crop of PC games offers stunning visuals. And for truly immersive game play with all the eye candy you need to play on a PC with a lot of graphics horse power. 3-way SLI produces stunning visuals, pristine image quality, and a truly awesome gaming experience,” said Ujesh Desai, general manager of GeForce desktop GPUs at Nvidia.

According to the developer, Nvidia’s new 3-way SLI delivers up to a 2.8x performance increase over a single GPU system, “giving high-end gamers 60 frames per second at resolutions as high as 2560x1600 and with 8x antialiasing”.

Unfortunately, at press time there were no benchmarks of 3-way SLI available in a respectable amount of modern video games on the Internet. Back in the days of its 4-way SLI multi-GPU systems Nvidia also decided not to let reviewers to benchmark four of its GeForce 7 GPUs working in company. The technology was scrapped eventually due to low performance gain and the release of the GeForce 8.

Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card has recommended retail price of $549 - $599 and upwards, whereas Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra costs $849, according to Nvidia’s official pricing. Nvidia nForce 680i SLI-based mainboards are priced at around $200.