News ATI's SLI-U-Like will have external connector

[GreatOldOne]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05...MVPU_External/

[smoguzbenjamin]

Sounds to me like the old Voodoo II cards. I wonder how these upgrade cards will increase performance... Maybe the mobo'll just send 50% of the workload to the old GPU and the rest to the upgrade card? Hmmm...

[DaSuperFly]

Now if i could afford just one of those cards *cries*

[DreamTheEndless]

so they are taking the worse tech choice because they are afraid of pissing people off? external (slower) interface so they don't make customers mad?

Bah-

[Reaper_Unreal]

The connection may not be technically slower. It all depends on the interface that they use and they way they implement spreading of the load. As you may or may not know, you don't necessarily have to send video data over a DVI connection, it is made for it, but it's just a wire. The drivers could be rewritten to send data very quickly over that connection. Think about it, an LCD (well at least mine) can do 1600x1200x32(24 really, alpha isn't transmitted, it's actually not even that, but let's pretend that you can breakdown the colour into components afterwards) at 120Hz, so that make a total data stream of ~600MB/s or ~2.4Gb/s which is still a fairly fast method of interconnecting. However, they way I understand they will be implementing this is with Supertiling or frame alternation. Frame alternation would be fantastic if you ask me. Suddenly all of those expensive multi-pass algorithms are possible, well, not all of them. If you ask me, ATI did the right thing going this route. Now I don't have to buy a second videocard, assuming they'll support the X800XL, and that I actually recieve my order.

[Tim S]

2.4GB/s is nothing when you have roughly 38GB/s of memory bandwidth on an X850 XTPE

[Reaper_Unreal]

Maybe so, but it's still nothing to sneeze at, how much bandwidth do you think that NVIDIA get out of their tiny little interconnect?

[Tim S]

Originally Posted by Reaper_Unreal

Maybe so, but it's still nothing to sneeze at, how much bandwidth do you think that NVIDIA get out of their tiny little interconnect?

They will not disclose that information to me, despite me asking for numbers or ballpark of numbers to get a better idea of how SLI works.

[K.I.T.T.]

well i reckon that Nvidia's SLI interconnect wouldn't give much more than the 2.4GB/s caucse if you actually look at the game performance figures then you will see the performance doesn't double by adding another i don't think there is even another 40% increase in performance so perhaps their interconnect is a less than expected performance increase due to the data transfer rate not being that great.....maybe just maybe?

and also this could be why they are a little sheepish to release figures

[Firehed]

That's not really true, it's often that SLI just becomes more CPU limited. If you have a situation where even SLI 6800Ultras will be GPU limited, you should see fairly close to a 100% increase (or 50% decrease depending how you look at it) by setting up or removing SLI. I've seen graphs that support it too. I believe the SLI bridge is just a syncronization connector. I've run in SLI mode without the connector in place (accidentally, but I've seen people do it on purpose too) and all it did was force AFR games into SFR mode and the two sections were slightly out of sync, which suggests that the data goes to both cards over PCIE versus one card sharing it to the other over the SLI connector.

[K.I.T.T.]

oh....i see what you mean. thats makes sense as well because there would be too much data to transmit over that little bridge