Widescreen Gaming Forum

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-driver-big-bang-geforce,6039.html

I'm prepared to go through some driver pain and tri-sli to support this long, long overdue announcement.

Garry

I am, for one, very excited about what this might mean for us. So far it's pretty vague what multimonitor SLI is though. Is it just dual out or can it be any display out on any card? Will this be the answer for 3x1920x1200 or is it just meaning we get horizontal-span mode back in Vista again? Lots of unanswered questions for Big Bang II. Could be the greatest thing ever for surround gaming or could mean very little depending upon the specifics. I guess we'll know soon enough. If it does away with the need to use SoftTH and/or TH2G I'll be very happy. Anything to get away from all those display restrictions we've had to deal with.

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Brad Hawthorne
Product Manager
Nthusim Pty. Ltd. | www.nthusim.com

I don't think it will eliminate the need for a TripleHead2Go. I do think it means that you will be able to run an SLI setup (with 2 cards only), using one output to drive the TripleHead2Go and two other outputs connected to side monitors with dual inputs. This allows you to game in triplehead, bu run three independent monitors on the Windows desktop. Currently doing this with SLI requires rebooting either before or after you game.

I don't think it will eliminate the need for SoftTH either, although if it did it would be fantastic. But what it means is that you will be able to render a SoftTH-powered image using SLIed GPUs, which removes a major drawback to SoftTH.

It sounds like when you enable SLI your other monitors will still be available (same thing as SLI turned off). What it doesn't sound like is you will be able to span the monitors ala TripleHead2Go.

Anyway, this comes far too late since AFAIK ATI cards never had this problem (or maybe they did? *shrug*). I think its too late for Nvidia since anyone upgrading now will still be buying HD4850/HD4870.h

AFAIK from reading all the rumours it is not multimonitor gaming ala TH2Go and SoftH; but being able to output to more than one monitor when SLI is enabled...which you can't now....which you have been able to do with crossfire for ages!

However it is good for me as I use my PC as a BluRay player and have to restart it every time to play one ...just changing the res to 1920x1080 doesn't seem to work for some reason. This means I can set the TV up as monitor 2 and switch to it for BluRay leaving SLI on all the time.....


....and now that I have just brought 2 more 24" Dells for WS TH2Go I may use one of my spare 19" as an extra windows desktop monitor while gamin...if possible :twisted:

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Dipping bags at Mach1.9

AFAIK from reading all the rumours it is not multimonitor gaming ala TH2Go and SoftH; but being able to output to more than one monitor when SLI is enabled...which you can't now....which you have been able to do with crossfire for ages!

The "rumor mill" tends to be made up of a pool of 12 year olds that like to make up things when they're bored. I don't believe anything from it -- good or bad. We'll know soon enough what they mean by the ambiguous multidisplay SLI though. With 177.79 floating around I wouldn't think it will be much longer before the 180 drivers are in the wild.

_________________
Brad Hawthorne
Product Manager
Nthusim Pty. Ltd. | www.nthusim.com

[quote]AFAIK from reading all the rumours it is not multimonitor gaming ala TH2Go and SoftH; but being able to output to more than one monitor when SLI is enabled...which you can't now....which you have been able to do with crossfire for ages!

The "rumor mill" tends to be made up of a pool of 12 year olds that like to make up things when they're bored. I don't believe anything from it -- good or bad. We'll know soon enough what they mean by the ambiguous multidisplay SLI though. With 177.79 floating around I wouldn't think it will be much longer before the 180 drivers are in the wild.

Ah you cynic you!

Hopefully the 180 drivers with the ability to use multiple monitors with SLI will come out tuesday with the physiX pack....we can only hope (dream?)....

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Dipping bags at Mach1.9

Oh... we can't help but speculate what Santa will bring us! :o

No rumours... but we could be creating a told-ya-what-it-shoulda-been petition.


The way I interpreted SLI I to work is it could:
*framelock two or more GPUs and a load balancing compositor would combine the output from the framebuffers (variable or fixed split frame rendering).
*framesync two or more GPUs and allow them to perform various permutations on alternate frame rendering.

Allowing more than one output/monitor would require further framelocking and framesyncing post compositing (I imagine that would be the least of the headaches).

The G-Sync cards available for the Quadro series would do something similar to this provided you called the appropriate NVidia extensions in your application.

With SLI II, if we could load balance and synchronise across multiple GPUs and maintain multiple output paths, I can't quite imagine how you would want to do something like alternate frame render or variable split frame load balancing then as the cross traffic would surely kill the gains. But one GPU per output, responsible for the best it can do for its patch of a large shared memory space, relocked and resynced again before being finally being let loose down the cable - would be fine by me :) (allowing a threads target processor and priority to be preserved wouldn't be seen as being too touchy feely)

I can't help but think about three dual head cards next if the above take on SLI II was delivered by Santa this time around... alternate frame rendering and/or image warping per output! That would finally make multipipe stereo on a PC (almost) catch up with last century's Onyx2 :oops:


How many sleeps till 180? :roll:

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