About SLI, how does it work?

RiversCuomoRiversCuomo Missouri New
edited March 2005 in Hardware
Hey, i was curious how the SLI boards work. Im mainly curious about the graphics end of the deal. How does it use the 2 video cards? Do they work by using RAID? Would 2 128MB cards work at the equivalent of a 256MB video card? Someone just explain indepth how they work, thank you.

Comments

  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited March 2005
    I first met up with SLI back in the days of the VooDoo 2 cards. It was the deal back then, and probably will be again.

    With SLI, one GPU handles the odd-numbered scanlines and the other takes care of the even-numbered ones.

    It can only use the memory of one card, unfortunately.

    There's a good article about it at Dan's Data.
  • Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
    edited March 2005
    profdlp wrote:
    I first met up with SLI back in the days of the VooDoo 2 cards. It was the deal back then, and probably will be again.

    With SLI, one GPU handles the odd-numbered scanlines and the other takes care of the even-numbered ones.

    It can only use the memory of one card, unfortunately.

    There's a good article about it at Dan's Data.
    That's one method. The other is Alternate Frame Rendering where the First card does the 1st full frame and the 2nd card does the 2nd full frame and so on. Which method of SLI is used for which game/app is determined by its (Nvidia determined) SLI profile. But you can set up your own SLI profiles also for apps Nividia hasn't done yet
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited March 2005
    Omega65 wrote:
    That's one method. The other is Alternate Frame Rendering...
    Does that make use of the memory on both cards? If so, that would be awesome. :D
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    Yeah...I want 1GB of video memory god damnit!! :thumbsup:
  • Omega65Omega65 Philadelphia, Pa
    edited March 2005
    Nope! Only one cards worth of Ram. There should be 512MB cards released this summer however.
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    Perhaps some manufacturers could come up with a card made specially for the 2nd SLI slot, with no RAM, to reduce the cost :)
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited March 2005
    RWB wrote:
    Yeah...I want 1GB of video memory...
    My comment about memory was not based on greed, or lust for power - I'm just cheap. :vimp:

    Two 128MB cards added together could be had for (relatively speaking) peanuts, compared to the half-gig monster cards coming out.

    Oh, well. Too bad...
    shwaip wrote:
    Perhaps some manufacturers could come up with a card made specially for the 2nd SLI slot, with no RAM, to reduce the cost :)
    That would be a neat idea, though I'd imagine the Graphics and Sound Forum would see a spike in people wondering why their new inexpensive video card wasn't working in a standalone configuration... :rolleyes:
  • Park_7677Park_7677 Missouri Member
    edited March 2005
    RiversCuomo wrote:
    Do they work by using RAID?
    I suggest you leave RAID to Steven before you get burnt ;D
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