SLI Memory Question...

RWB

So I know that currently if you have two 128MB cards in SLI that you will only have 128MB of memory available. Do you think this could be a driver thing, I notice drivers are changing up some of the abailities with SLI giving more and more cool things as time goes by such as now being able to have two different cards , but it'll run at the slowest card's speed or whatever.

So my question is simple. If you have two 6600GT's with only 128MB of memory on each, could they eventually release a driver that will allow you to utilize the memory on both cards to effectivly have 256MB of memory instead of the crappy 128? Right now I am tempted to just buy a 6800GS 256MB card and sell my 6600GT becuase memory is a bigger issue to me it seems.

roland_dmp

Since you mainly bought your board for running SLI, why not just save up a bit for a 6800 Ultra and eventually fill up your second slot with another 6800 Ultra? Or better yet save up for a 7800GTX? Sure they're expensive, but from what I hear, well worth the money, and memory definately won't be your problem for a while.

RWB

With the games I play I mostly get memory related issues. Becuase I love high resolution textures over screen resolution anyday :P

Sledgehammer70

Well there are a few factors that lead me to say that Nvidia will allow the memory to be shared.... but the main reason they won't as of now is because of memory loss. As of now each card takes a section of your screen and renders it in parallel with the other card, each card using its own memory. If they decided to poll memory as if it was shared you would actually lose performance. As each card would be trying to access memory from each other causing more info and tasks to be created.

Now things that make me wonder that it will happen is the new Nvidia Quad 7800GTX cards, as they say those cards share everything, having 2 Gig's of memory and all sorts of other things. So maybe we will see a fix in the drivers for dell's new Quad SLI systems.

Now my first SLI setup was 2 Leadtek 6600GT’s Extreme’s when I went for Dual 7800GT’s I never looked back as the performance increase was huge! Than I jumped to a few 7800GTX 256, than to 7800GTX 512’s and have yet to be let down. I also run 1 6800GT setup in SLI and still see a huge performance leap over the original 6600GT’s I once ran. But if I were you I would hold off until March! AS I know Nvidia will be releasing there new Flag Ship card and the 6, & 7 series will drop in price….

RWB

March it is I can wait, not like I play games much lately anyways... just wanna laptop right now.... with quad SLI

Sledgehammer70

I think you have a long time to wait for Quad SLI in a Lapppy! let alone Dual

roland_dmp

Sledgehammer70 wrote:

Now my first SLI setup was 2 Leadtek 6600GT’s Extreme’s when I went for Dual 7800GT’s I never looked back as the performance increase was huge! Than I jumped to a few 7800GTX 256, than to 7800GTX 512’s and have yet to be let down. I also run 1 6800GT setup in SLI and still see a huge performance leap over the original 6600GT’s I once ran. But if I were you I would hold off until March! AS I know Nvidia will be releasing there new Flag Ship card and the 6, & 7 series will drop in price….

Just toss that bottomless bag of money my way when you're through with it Sledge I'm still in love with your setup!

Sledgehammer70

If it was bottomless I would jhave Lemonlimes Cooling system... my wife has me on a leash as well.... I just have to do a ton of side work to pay for this hobby!

RWB

roland_dmp wrote:

Since you mainly bought your board for running SLI, why not just save up a bit for a 6800 Ultra and eventually fill up your second slot with another 6800 Ultra? Or better yet save up for a 7800GTX? Sure they're expensive, but from what I hear, well worth the money, and memory definately won't be your problem for a while.

When I bought mt 6600GT it was in the same position as the 6800GT is now in compairison to whats out now.

So the biggest problem is that I am beginning to wonder if SLI is actually worth it for a guy like me. On one hand if I did come up with the money I'd get two cards at the same time. But if I were to buy a 6800GT or the GS which I plan on getting instead then when I felt the time was needed to upgrade again I'll probably be able to buy a single card all over again which would be faster than dual 6800GT/GS's for a similar price. Possibly cheaper though since I could sell the older card off and make some money back. I am sure I could sell this 6600GT for at least $100 right now becuase it's so fabulous and simi-new :P

roland_dmp

Very good point! Well, eventually maybe you'll get lucky enough to be able to afford to fill up both slots. And if all else fails, at least it's PCI-E (which I'm sure they'll eventually make full use of). As it stands, I would agree with Sledge and wait for the price drop in March, then get what you can afford.

deicist

I don't think you'll see memory sharing in SLi any time soon because of the physical limitations of the PCI express bus... for memory sharing to work you'd need a dedicated link between the 2 cards (a data link, not just a control one like the current SLi connector). It's a conceptual thing, the PCI express bus (and AGP for that matter) is designed to allow data to go from the 'system' (cpu, northbridge) to a graphics card as quickly as possible, it's not designed to allow 2 devices on the bus to talk to each other quickly without involving the CPU. If it's possible at all I'd imagine theres some CPU overhead involved.