It’s been a long time coming, but AMD and NVidia have finally traded an olive branch and soon you’ll be able to drop your NVidia GPU’s in SLI configuration on an AMD-powered motherboard.
“Long term gamers probably remember that for a long time AMD offered great high-end CPUs, but in recent years, AMD’s stature as the preferred gaming CPU fell by the wayside and Intel CPUs have been the gamers’ choice. For this reason, we’ve only licensed SLI for motherboards with Intel chipsets,” Nvidia explains. “However, we’ve been recently hearing chants of “SLI for AMD CPUs”, and figured that now is a great time to do it.”
This is great for budget gamers, as AMD chipsets are typically a lot cheaper than their Intel counterparts and perform just as well (if not better in many cases), and matching them with NVidia GPU’s will make for some amazing gaming systems.
via Nvidia and AMD Hug It Out, SLI Coming to AMD Motherboards! – HotHardware.
Hardware amd, nvidia, sli
Triple-GPU systems are still a fair rarity in the consumer space, but frequently discussed and coveted by hard-core gamers all over. In a recent benchmark by Toms Hardware, they put NVidia’s Triple-SLI against AMD’s Crossfire 3-way to see which one performs better. Much to my own surprise, the AMD solution not only yields slightly better performance, but much better efficiently with a vastly lower power consumption and heat output.
CrossFire came out with a huge overall scaling lead over SLI, and removing the one title that didn’t reflect that average would have made the lead even bigger. Superior scaling allowed two mid-priced Radeon HD 6950s to approximate the performance of two higher-cost GeForce GTX 570s, while three HD 6950s took the performance win over three GTX 570s.
If these figures cross over into the Multi-GPU/single-PCB space like the basis of AMD and NVidia’s newest announcements, AMD could have a big win on it’s hands in CrossFire Scaling.
Triple-GPU Scaling: AMD CrossFire Vs. Nvidia SLI : Is Multi-GPU The Game Changer?.
Hardware amd, benchmark, crossfire, nvidia, sli
TechReport takes the current “state of the art” in high-end video setups, AMD CrossFire and NVidia SLI, and runs them in some gaming benchmarks with hardware from several vendors. The goal is to find out not just whether AMD or NVidia is better, but which cards pair up the best for the buck. No surprise really which ones wins right now:
Finally, the performance of two GeForce GTX 580 cards in SLI is well and truly bitchin’. The power draw and noise levels are at least reasonable for this class of setup, too. There are few substitutes for a GTX 580 SLI rig at this very moment, although as we’ve noted, some potential competition from AMD is imminent.
Perhaps what I found most surprising was this:
The easiest call we can make is that the Radeon HD 6850 CrossFireX setup does indeed offer performance comparable to a single GeForce GTX 580 at a lower price. That combo adds up to a very nice value proposition, provided you are willing to sacrifice four expansion slots worth of space in your PC for graphic cards—and provided you’re willing to live with the occasional compatibility and performance pitfalls one will inevitably encounter with a multi-GPU solution.
It’s surprising in two ways, to me:
- Bad thing for AMD: That a single GeForce GTX580 is powerful enough that it takes 2 Radeon’s to match it.
- Good thing for AMD: That the two Radeons are cheaper than the GeForce.
Not sure if those balance out.
Paired up: The latest GPUs – The Tech Report – Page 1.
Hardware amd, benchmark, crossfire, nvidia, sli
Well that didn’t take long. Over at Guru3D they took a pair of the new GTX580′s and put them through the wringer in SLI configuration, with screaming results. With such amazing performance in 1 card, two cards winds up bottlenecking the CPU which can’t feed them fast enough. When all is said and done, what’s the result? Well, first off you’re gonna need some serious wattage to pull this off:
Power consumption then, well it is high. When observing Crysis Warhead, which really is tremendously GPU intense, we notice power draws well over the 700+ Watt. You do need to be aware of that, each GPU has a 242W TDP, that’s nearing 500 Watt already. Then add a nice spicy processor, likely overclocked a little drawing say 175W~200W and then the residuals like chipset and devices really can accumulate to significant numbers. But hey, this is the extreme high-end arena, it never has been any different. It’s just that over the past years we as consumers and press have become much more critical about this topic.
In addition, if you want to go triple-screen stereo then you’ll need the two cards in SLI configuration. But if you’ve got the cash and the power, it’s phenomenal performance.
GeForce GTX 580 SLI review.
Hardware gtx580, nvidia, sli
What would happen to your gaming performance if instead of running in SLI in x16/x16, you instead ran in SLI at x8/x8? [H]ard|OCP answers that question in their latest graphics article. The answer was, to me at least, somewhat surprising. It appears that PCIe bandwidth, at least for games, is not that big of a deal. I wonder if the same holds true for GPGPU applications?
If you are running on a 30″ display at 2560×1600 or below, an x8/x8 SLI or CFX configuration will perform the same as a x16/x8 or x16/x16 configuration. The only time that you should even be slightly concerned about running at x8/x8 is when you move up to a multiple display setup. When we pushed the GTX 480 SLI at 5760×1200 we saw up to a 7% difference in performance between x8/x8 and x16/x16, in favor of x16/x16, but that was in one game only.
via Introduction – GTX 480 SLI @ 2560×1600 – GTX 480 SLI PCIe Bandwidth Perf. – x16/x16 vs. x8/x8 | [H]ard|OCP.
Hardware nvidia, sli
Which setup is better in 3×1 multi-display gaming? The GeForce GTX 480 SLI or the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 2GB & 1GB CrossFireX configurations? You should be able to guess the answer. But in case you cannot, [H]ard|OCP has posted an article looking at the 3D Vision Surround experience versus AMD’s Eyefinity.
This evaluation’s focus is on NVIDIA’s Surround Technology supporting multi-display gaming and its performance versus AMD’s Eyefinity all using identical 3×1 Landscape configurations. This will give you an idea how GTX 480 SLI stacks up to 2GB and 1GB HD 5870 CrossFireX in 3×1 gaming at 5760×1200 resolution. We will have a separate performance evaluation on 3D Vision Surround gaming coming up soon as well as articles covering GTX 460 SLI and GTX 470 SLI 3×1 performance.
NVIDIA Surround Technology Performance Review @ [H]ard|OCP
Hardware amd, eyefinity, nvidia, sli
We have been talking for awhile about ATI’s Eyefinity and how great it is for gaming. Recently NVIDIA has also gotten into the game, as it were, by using 3D Vision Surround. [H]ard|OCP has posted an article looking at the 3D Vision Surround experience using older, and less expensive, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 video cards in an SLI configuration.
Take your 2 year old GTX 280 video card and pair it up with another 2 year old GTX 280 and what do you get? You get an NVIDIA SLI system capable of delivering huge multi-display NV Surround gaming resolutions with the latest games.
How did it turn out? Let’s just sum it up by saying that NVIDIA won the Gold Award from [H]ard|OCP.
via NVIDIA GTX 280 SLI 3D Surround Experience @ [H]ard|OCP
Hardware 3d, nvidia, sli
Guru3d has posted an article on taking four GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards and putting them into a 4-way SLI setup. Nvidia has recently released a new driver that enables 4-way SLI. However, there is just one small problem. The only “game” that supports 4-way SLI is 3DMark Vantage, which is not really a game. To prevent the CPU from being the bottleneck, they needed to overclock the Core i7 980 Extreme processor. But then they ran into a new problem. What motherboard would support 4-way SLI? They finally realized that they would need two Nvidia NF200 integrated circuits embedded on the motherboard in order to be able to accomplish this feat. How did they do it and what was their final score? Click the link below to find out.
via : GeForce GTX 4-way SLI review @ Guru3d
Hardware gtx480, nvidia, sli
Guru3d is at it again. In the past they have added extra voltage to a GeForce GTX 480 and a GeForce GTX 470 to see how far you could overclock them. Today, they take three GeForce GTX 480 cards and put them into triple SLI mode to see how well they perform. Take a look at that picture to the right and realize that it required a 1.2 Kilowatt power supply to power the system. Under load, the system consumed over 1 Kilowatt of power. Of course, overclocking the Core i7 965X to 3.75 GHz also adds to the power load.
But how did it perform? Was 3-way SLI worth it? Well, you will have to read the article to find out, although this little teaser should give you an idea.
Far Cry 2 did a little better, though 3-way SLI again is massively limited by the processor it at the very least scaled fairly nice. And 2-way SLI, well just look at 2560×1600… that’s roughly 1.9x performance over the single GPU GTX 480.
via GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI review @ Guru3D.
Hardware gtx480, nvidia, sli
If
you thought the 3-Way SLI GTX480 benchmark was a bit extreme, then check out this impressive 4-way SLI GTX480 review from Hardware.info . At least they don’t have any quams about stating up front that the entire test if a bit frivolous.
To date, no publication in the world is a 4-way GTX 480 SLI arrangement tested. EVGA assistant Peter “Shamino” Tan improved earlier this week have any 3DMark records and ASUS has on his Facebook page a Rampage III Extreme motherboard with four GTX 480 cards to show , but a comprehensive analysis of the performance of quad-SLI with The GeForce GTX 480 is not yet come.
No sensible person is likely a setup like this ever, but that should not spoil the fun: In this article you can read what benefits you’re actually in 4-way SLI GTX 480 expect!
The end result isn’t all that surprising either. The performance boost in most applications is negligible, with the CPU and bus bandwidth being the limiting factors. In certain (Very extreme) configurations, there is a boost, such as this gain from 53 to 57fps. Otherwise, I’ld save the money.
via 4-way SLI GeForce GTX 480 review | Hardware.Info Netherlands.
Hardware extreme, fermi, nvidia, sli
VizWorld.com 
Comments