Nvidia and AMD Hug It Out, SLI Coming To AMD Mobos 120
MojoKid writes "In a rather surprising turn of events, NVIDIA has just gone on record that, starting with AMD's 990 series chipset, you'll be able to run multiple NVIDIA graphics cards in SLI on AMD-based motherboards, a feature previously only available on Intel or NVIDIA-based motherboards. Nvidia didn't go into many specifics about the license, such as how long it's good for, but did say the license covers 'upcoming motherboards featuring AMD's 990FX, 990X, and 970 chipsets.'"
Re:Mix and match? (Score:3, Informative)
You already can use an Nvidia card as dedicated physx with an AMD card, but in order to not create a bottleneck and actually experience a performance loss, you need an Nvidia card that is more or less on par with your AMD card. So if you have, say, an AMD 6970, you would need like an Nvidia 460 at the very least to get good enough performance boost for it to even be worth the extra cash instead of just going crossfire.
SLI: Sorely Lacking IMO (Score:5, Informative)
Having built my last two gaming rigs to utilize SLI, my opinion is that it's more trouble than it's worth.
It seems like a great idea: buy the graphics card at the sweet spot in the price / power curve, peg it for all its worth until two years later when games start to push it to its limit. Then buy a second card, which is now very affordable, throw it in SLI and bump your rig back up to a top end performer.
The reality is less perfect. Want to go dual monitor? Expect to buy a third graphics card to run that second display. Apparently this has been fixed in Vista / Windows 7, but I'm still using XP and it's a massive pain. I'm relegated to using a single monitor in Windows, which is basically fine since I only use it to game, and booting back into Linux for two-display goodness.
Rare graphics bugs that only affect SLI users are common. I recently bought The Witcher on Steam for $5, this game is a few years old and has been updated many times. However if you're running SLI, expect to be able to see ALL LIGHT SOURCES, ALL THE TIME, THROUGH EVERY SURFACE. Only affects SLI users, so apparently it's a "will not fix". The workaround doesn't work.
When Borderlands first came out, crashed regularly for about the first two months. The culprit? A bug that only affected SLI users.
Then there's the heat issue! Having two graphics cards going at full tear will heat up your case extremely quickly. Expect to shell out for an after-market cooling solution unless you want your cards to idle at 80C and easily hit 95C during operation. The lifetime of your cards will be drastically shortened.
This is my experience with SLI anyway. I'm a hardcore gamer who has always built his own rigs, and this is the last machine I will build with SLI, end of story.
Re:Mix and match? (Score:3, Informative)
Parent is incorrect and it's therefore no suprise that he provided no evidence or even supportive argument for his assertions.
'physx' is a marketing term and an API currently only hardware accelerated through nVidia cards. Adding more AMD cards, as the parent suggests, doesn't do squat if what you want is 'physx' on a hardware path. Games typicall only have two paths, software or 'physx', so the load either lands on the main-CPU (you only have AMD card(s)) or on the GPU (you have nVidia card with physx enabled).
He's also incorrect about "bottlenecks" (what are those? Surely not PCIe lanes) and really, anyone who modded that informative did so without knowledge of the issues. Quite the opposite is true, even a lower-end card dedicated to this task will provide much better performance than having to go through the software path.
Of course, this would all be pretty moot if AMD could provide an API-conforming hardware path for THEIR cards, but for some reason that isn't happening.
Other posts talk about the old dedicated PhysX cards. Those are as relevant as a S3 Virge in this discussion. Forget about them.
And yes, nVidia explicitly disables physx when it detects a non-nVidia card is installed. You can use hacked drivers. That's not the point.
As I said. Asshats.
Re:Not all that surprising (Score:5, Informative)
"4 core Intel CPUs outperform 6 core AMD CPUs in all the multi-threaded tasks I've looked at, rather badly in some cases."
Do raw x86 without any specialized instructions (minus multi-core stuff) and you'll find the opposite happening, AMD wins hands-down.
That's why AMD powers our food production systems. We don't need the specialized instructions like SSE3/4/4a/etc. and AMD's raw x86 performance wins.
Intel NEEDS those specialized instructions added on to keep pace.