Vega said:
From anandtech's preview posted on Oct. 29th, 2004:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2258&p=7
Now quit being a dick.
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Why SLI sucks and is a waste of time:
- Thread starter dderidex
- Start date
From anandtech's preview posted on Oct. 29th, 2004:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2258&p=7
Now quit being a dick.
I'd also like to add something else. No one here can deny that all of this arguing is based on pure speculation. We have no idea what the future holds for certain technologies, so all you can do is really buy for what you're doing now. That said, right now two SLI'd 6800gts or ultras give you the best performance you can buy, period. That cannot be disputed. And what it comes down to is if you're willing to pay for it or not.
seasponge said:so is there a profile for 3dmark?
yep
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_hardware_sliapps.html
There's the list of currently supported apps right now. As they say, it will be updated frequently for newly released games and as they tweak older games to work better with SLI.
Shzitt said:
Then show me why WMV9 hardware decode acceleration is supported on the 6600GT class of CPU's, and a certain few PCIe 6800 and 6800LE cards (based on the NV41 GPU) and none of the rest of the Geforce 6 series does, despite nVidia's former statements to the contrary:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2305
The Extremetech article is dated, Anandtech and other sites already having reviewed PureVideo also show that it is borked on the NV40/45 class of GPU's.
I don't want to get off-topic, so I'll say this: As someone said before, if you bought two Voodoo2 cards and ran them in SLI, you didn't need a "Supported Games List"; if the game supported the API's of the day (Glide, OpenGL, DirectX), things worked. In the current case, it doesn't matter if your game supports current OpenGL and DirectX API's; your game needs to be supported by nVidia. I think that that's garbage myself, and if I was an enthusiast with the bucks for a top-flite system, I wouldn't pay for SLI unless that were to change.
DemonDiablo
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Vega said:
LOL your kidding me as if I cant afford an SLI setup. No Id rather waste my money on a new dual core smp opteron system with a more than possible SLI capable mobo. Now putting our wallets aside...
If you have so much more "exp" than I have, which really doesnt matter to me in the slightest bit, then why are you the one who is bitching and moaning about how your sit isnt working and im the guy sitting over here laughing his ass off reading all these posts with you "bleeding edge guys" talking about how nVidida is screwing you out of your SLI performance in every game
gg friend
Sgt_Strider
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SLI doesn't sucks and it's not a waste of time. Technology takes time to mature and the SLI has been available for less than 6 months so give me a break before you go and criticize the potentials of this technology. I'm sure there are reasons for not supporting ATI other than the fact that Nvidia hates ATI.
Pacific Fighters is a legit problem though. There isn't any SLI support for it, and it supports PS 3.0 on the 6800 series. If you turn up all the settings, even a 6800 Ultra would get the living snot beat out of it, whereas to make it fast and insanely detailed, you'd need SLI.
Of course I have a 9600xt, and makes me think I'm using my TNT2 M64.
I'm not sure if there is a demo out for it, but you guys oughta try it, even if you don't like flight games.
Of course I have a 9600xt, and makes me think I'm using my TNT2 M64.
I'm not sure if there is a demo out for it, but you guys oughta try it, even if you don't like flight games.
nVidia's use of the abbrevation 'SLI' is little more than an attempt to profit from 3dfx's SLI, which is why they didn't bother telling us that it's little more than a hack to divide the load of 3D rendering, depending on the situation and for 'supported' games' only.LoneWolf said:
This attitude isn't much different from during the 3Dmark 'optimizations'.
While I can see that a technique like nVidia's SLI may be benificial in some situations, this whole issue nevertheless has a very bad smell to it, that of overly friendly salesmen trying to sell their stuff to unsuspecting vict^H^H^H^Hcustomers, who probably didn't bother doing some research on the things they're buying.
Caveat emptor?
lilpoopypants
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dumbest thing ive ever seen posted. and old news that everyone already knew.dderidex said:
the performance bonus is only necessary for the stressing games like HL2/Doom3 ect and all those games are going to be covered.
not grim fandango (that game is so f'n old), what a twit.
I could care less for old games. But what if you just picked up a game that no one expected to actually be pretty good like The Chronicles of Riddick??
Now you have to pray to GOD N that they release a profile for it fast enough so you can @ least enjoy the last 2 stages in the game in SLI.............I say shweet!!!!!!
You can count me in............NOT!!!!!
Im glad I waited and didnt make the switch.
Now you have to pray to GOD N that they release a profile for it fast enough so you can @ least enjoy the last 2 stages in the game in SLI.............I say shweet!!!!!!
You can count me in............NOT!!!!!
Im glad I waited and didnt make the switch.
Brent_Justice
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D4hPr0 said:
now there's a game that could benefit from SLI, especially in SM 2.0++ mode with those soft shadows at high resolution
For most of us, upgrading to SLI isnt only about buying a new motherboard that supports it, two video cards, and possibly an extra beefy power supply cost 1000+ dollars. We would be stuck with a perfectly fine AGP 6800 or X800. When building a whole new rig though SLI is a definate consideration.
And it serves as a perfect example of my case.Brent_Justice said:
It was released AFTER SLI was, yet....is there a SLI profile yet? No! So, if you had a brand new SLI system at Christmas and unwrapped Chronicles of Riddick...guess what...you get to play it SLOWER than if you had just a single 6800 Ultra (or whatnot).
But, wait, devs are CERTAIN to make SURE nVidia has a SLI profile for all their games, right? And nVidia will be sure to release a 'leaked' driver before every intense game comes out that includes a SLI profile for it, right?
M1ster_R0gers
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I am seeing both sides of this. I have an agp 6800np, and that suits me fine, and hopefully will for the next two years. My rule is when I have to drop the resolution down to 800x600 for acceptable frame rates its time to buy another card. It replaced a 9500 pro which just was not cutting it for farcry, doom3 and HL2.
I was and still am interested in SLI but since now I see that it is not a true hardware split, and drivers need to be written I am even more hesitant. The terminology SLI is almost as bad as AMD PR numbers in my opinion now. And even more unfortanute for the rest of us is the driver releases bloating even more.
PS. whoever said sims2 ran fine on an xp1700 and a mx440 is not being realistic. On the 9500 in a 2.2ghz XP system it was choppy at anything over 800x600. It runs smooth on a 2.5ghz A64 with the 6800 @ 1152x864 with some degree of AA enabled.
I was and still am interested in SLI but since now I see that it is not a true hardware split, and drivers need to be written I am even more hesitant. The terminology SLI is almost as bad as AMD PR numbers in my opinion now. And even more unfortanute for the rest of us is the driver releases bloating even more.
PS. whoever said sims2 ran fine on an xp1700 and a mx440 is not being realistic. On the 9500 in a 2.2ghz XP system it was choppy at anything over 800x600. It runs smooth on a 2.5ghz A64 with the 6800 @ 1152x864 with some degree of AA enabled.
dderidex said:And it serves as a perfect example of my case.
It was released AFTER SLI was, yet....is there a SLI profile yet? No! So, if you had a brand new SLI system at Christmas and unwrapped Chronicles of Riddick...guess what...you get to play it SLOWER than if you had just a single 6800 Ultra (or whatnot).
But, wait, devs are CERTAIN to make SURE nVidia has a SLI profile for all their games, right? And nVidia will be sure to release a 'leaked' driver before every intense game comes out that includes a SLI profile for it, right?
You should make yourself a sign and go picket outside nvidia's offices...
Everquest 2 has problems running on a single nvidia 6800 GPU (crashing) let alone SLI.dderidex said:
Hoping that nvidia will support your game after spending $800 to $1000 on video cards seems a stretch of faith. If nvidia open sourced the SLI driver or provided a SDK it might alleviate the problem of nvidia not supporting your specific game.
How much time do you want to give to nvidia to support your particular game? Nvidia doesn't release drivers very often and your game might not even be able to run in SLI mode according to nvidia.Dr. X said:
You now have to hope nvidia supports your game and hope your game will support SLI.
panhead said:
Ok, first of all, I'm confident that they're actually going to support a technology that they've invested millions of dollars into. And no, I don't think they're lying when they say they will update "frequently."
Second of all, a game doesn't have to support SLI. If you'd have read, SLI is completely transparent to a game. The only thing necessary is the presence of a profile for the game in the drivers.
And finally, I think it's actually a good idea to make it a necessity to support the game in the drivers. I'd much rather have it work well in most games than have a shitty implementation in every game back to Wolfenstein 3d.
SLI is dependent on how a game renders an image. Some engines are not compatible with SLI, example Flight Simulator 2004. An SLI setup actually runs slower than a single card.Dr. X said:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041123/sli-performance-30.html
panhead said:
OK, from reading that, there is nothing inherent in the FS2004 engine that makes it unable to work with SLI. It simply is not implemented in the drivers.
And of course an SLI setup with its added overhead is going to be slower than a single card...at 1024x768 where you're cpu-bound! You're not buying an SLI setup to run a game at the resolution, so that's completely irrelevant.
edit: oh, and different games don't have unique ways of "rendering an image." Today, they rely on one of two APIs. I hope you know what those are.
Dr. X said:
Engines may be using only two APIs, D3D or OpenGL, but there are a lot of ways of using those APIs that can cause performace issues for SLI, see Chapter 7.
http://download.nvidia.com/developer/GPU_Programming_Guide/GPU_Programming_Guide.pdf
If the game developer does not or can't follow these guidelines, nvidia may not be able to implement the SLI driver. It is not just, you are using OpenGL to render so use AFR mode or D3D use SFR mode.
I understand that its a new technology and we should give it time before drivers or profiles mature etc. Its just like when Intel released HT and all apps had to be rewritten to take advantage of it, but HT P4's cost just a bit more than the non HT counterparts so it was a small investment that you COULD wait on.
When I went the HT route I never found myself saying "Man I wish this worked with HT so it was 10% faster" because it didnt cost that much. Now take a typical SLI setup for instance. You dropped prolly $1k on it and now you have to wait a certain amout of time before it works with that one or two games that you really like. By that time your setup went down in cost and you are kicking yourself in the a$$ for spending all that cash @ the time and you never took full advantage of it.
Im not rippin on N @ all. I think SLI has a future, but for something that N marketed so freakin much I would make sure that new profiles were added every week.
Some of you seem to forget that some people have different tastes in games and not all people play HL2 and D3 etc.
Remember when Call of Duty came out and some of us had to wait 2 weeks before we could play the game the way we wanted to because it was crashing constantly.
I for one hate to wait and like to play a game THE WAY ITS MEANT TO BE PLAYED...........with SLI ON!!!!!
When I went the HT route I never found myself saying "Man I wish this worked with HT so it was 10% faster" because it didnt cost that much. Now take a typical SLI setup for instance. You dropped prolly $1k on it and now you have to wait a certain amout of time before it works with that one or two games that you really like. By that time your setup went down in cost and you are kicking yourself in the a$$ for spending all that cash @ the time and you never took full advantage of it.
Im not rippin on N @ all. I think SLI has a future, but for something that N marketed so freakin much I would make sure that new profiles were added every week.
Some of you seem to forget that some people have different tastes in games and not all people play HL2 and D3 etc.
Remember when Call of Duty came out and some of us had to wait 2 weeks before we could play the game the way we wanted to because it was crashing constantly.
I for one hate to wait and like to play a game THE WAY ITS MEANT TO BE PLAYED...........with SLI ON!!!!!
Whoa, something I did not realize...section 7.1, bottom of page 54, top of 55...it says you can force SLI in a game with no profile by adding a profile with the executable name in the control panel under display properties. That sounds intriguing.
edit: hmm...I might have misread it, it says it's for application developers, not sure if this means it's accessible in the normal driver control panel.
edit: hmm...I might have misread it, it says it's for application developers, not sure if this means it's accessible in the normal driver control panel.
Dr. X said:
Quoted for truth.
While I like things to "just work", no questions asked, I have to say that it seems ridiculous to expect a technology in its infancy to not have any serious hitches. Instead of worrying about what's going to happen to SLI technology, how about exercising some patience and see what *actually* happens? I'd like to see Nvidia work out the kinks in SLI, but that's not going to happen in a few days time.
I hope it is not a problem, we'll just have to wait and see what games nvidia supports. I am uneasy about relying on a hardware vender to support my particular game, especially when the list of supported games is so small right now, 18 games.Dr. X said:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nzone_hardware_sliapps.html
Dr. X said:
From Tom's review "If no SLI profile exists for a game, there is no SLI rendering. It is not possible to force SLI mode or generate your own profile. According to NVIDIA however the driver already contains over 50 profiles for games running with SLI. For newer titles this therefore means that SLI system owners have to wait for a new driver. But even then there is no guarantee that SLI will be possible with a particular game."
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041123/sli-performance-05.html
edit: Also from Tom's "According to NVIDIA there are games that are simply not compatible with SLI. Microsoft's Flight Simulator 9 and Novalogic's Joint Operations for example both cause problems. As of the test date we were unable to find out the precise reasons why. NVIDIA only talks about frame buffering techniques used in games of this sort that are problematic for SLI."
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041123/sli-performance-05.html
This might be a big problem for some users. Nvidia should make public which games are not SLI compatible.
So you buy a car with a navi system which cost an extra $1k, but it only works in city X and city Z. Thats completely acceptable right????
So unless you only play the games which have profiles written for them.....it is right now a complete waste of time and not to mention alot of money.
Like I said before it needs to mature just like anything else, but certain technologies need to be implemented a bit better right from the start when people spend a shit load of money on.
If you are still one of the people that think they could wait for SLI profiles to catch up imagine not getting the profile you want for two months or so. Now if you still have a smile on your face let me sell you a little black box with a new 3.4EE and charge you $900 for it, but I wont send you the cpu for a couple months or so when I can get it for a bit less and make some cash on you.
If Nvidia put half the effort into profiles that they put into marketing and hyping it up(it does deserve the hype) we would be in good shape and I would have two video cards in my system.
So unless you only play the games which have profiles written for them.....it is right now a complete waste of time and not to mention alot of money.
Like I said before it needs to mature just like anything else, but certain technologies need to be implemented a bit better right from the start when people spend a shit load of money on.
If you are still one of the people that think they could wait for SLI profiles to catch up imagine not getting the profile you want for two months or so. Now if you still have a smile on your face let me sell you a little black box with a new 3.4EE and charge you $900 for it, but I wont send you the cpu for a couple months or so when I can get it for a bit less and make some cash on you.
If Nvidia put half the effort into profiles that they put into marketing and hyping it up(it does deserve the hype) we would be in good shape and I would have two video cards in my system.
D4hPr0 said:
I see where you're coming from, but your example doesn't parallel very well. It's not like it doesn't work at all (not even receiving the cpu for 2 months). Of course it would be stupid for someone to buy the setup now if none of the games they played were supported. The same would be the case even if the games they play were supported but didn't need the extra performance SLI offers. See what I'm saying?
Anyway, I completely agree that right now, the only people that should logically buy it are the one's that play the games supported by it.
from Tom's "According to NVIDIA there are games that are simply not compatible with SLI. Microsoft's Flight Simulator 9 and Novalogic's Joint Operations for example both cause problems. As of the test date we were unable to find out the precise reasons why. NVIDIA only talks about frame buffering techniques used in games of this sort that are problematic for SLI."Dr. X said:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gr...ormance-05.html
I said it before and it still holds true. The only people who could not like SLI are the absolute diehard ATI fanatics. I'm not saying you have to be willing to go out and buy it, but EVERYONE benefits from this technology. Either directly or indirectly. This is something new people. It isn't going to be perfect and it will take time to get the maximum benefit out of it.
lilpoopypants
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i dont know why you guys are complaining so much, hate nvidia or something?
or when ATI has sli it will be the greatest right? its bound to have similar pitfalls, and we all know who has better drivers.. so if ATIs is driver dependant, I know what SLI solution I'm using.
the people who build SLI rigs know what they are getting into, they are dumping an extra $400-500 on another video card and an extra $100 on a motherboard than usual.
they probabaly know more than any of you about this entire situation. they are actually using it.
so if you dont like it, dont use it. complain about something that actually WORKS that other people are enjoying immensely.
or when ATI has sli it will be the greatest right? its bound to have similar pitfalls, and we all know who has better drivers.. so if ATIs is driver dependant, I know what SLI solution I'm using.
the people who build SLI rigs know what they are getting into, they are dumping an extra $400-500 on another video card and an extra $100 on a motherboard than usual.
they probabaly know more than any of you about this entire situation. they are actually using it.
so if you dont like it, dont use it. complain about something that actually WORKS that other people are enjoying immensely.