Sli or not to Sli?

[JunkBarMan]

Let me take a step back from everything I am reading on the net here, and ask this question just to clear my head: Sli allows you to run two video cards together at the same time correct?

So, if you don't plan on running say, two 6800gt cards, and instead just want to go with one 7800GTX, then you don't really need Sli, correct?

Unless I am not understanding it sounds like we are going back to the days of when the Voodoo 2 cards were all the new thing. You could pair up two of the Voodoo 2 cards and get something like 1024x768 resolution, which was just awesome at that time. Now these new cards are the same idea just new versions?

I hear ATi has something called Crossfire in the works, where you can actually use two different cards and they will work in unison, i.e. X800XT and X850XT.

What does everyone think about this and who is using it, or plans on going with either of these two setups?

[GepperRankins]

i think it stands for scan line interlace.


it works by one card rendering every odd scanline and the other doing every even scanline. sounds good but i've heard you realistically only get 120% the performance of one card

[clocker]

Check this.

[GepperRankins]

no numbers about ati crossfire yet but it looks promising - http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...602/index.html

alternate frame rendering sounds pretty clever

[lynx]

i think it stands for scan line interlace.


it works by one card rendering every odd scanline and the other doing every even scanline. sounds good but i've heard you realistically only get 120% the performance of one card

That's what it stood for when applied to the old Voodoo2 cards. Because each card did exactly half the work, both cards had to be identical.

Nvidia's Nforce4 SLI means Scalable Link Interface. Despite what Tom's Hardware says, I do not believe that the cards will need to be identical, although limitations in the current firmware and drivers make that a necessity at the moment.