Widescreen Gaming Forum

BloodTotal, perhaps your fury blinded you but if you hadn't noticed, behardware.com is a sister site to hardware.fr which ranks 3140/153 in traffic on that site you linked.

As for "SLI is required for 3D surround." Knowing Nvidia, they meant "SLI is required for 3D >and< surround."

Their history indicates a very unlikely probability that they'd allow 3 screens off 1 card unless you have one of those sli-on-a-stick cards.

thanks for pointing that out

Of course SLI is required for surround support. The requirement is 3 ports out and nVidia only does 2 ports out per card. That means if nothing else you need a second card for display #3. SLI is used to communicate the data between the 2 cards. What still boggles the mind is why this isn't called SLI Mosaic mode and why it wasn't released years ago.

IMHO, it shows an inherent lack of vision on nVidia's part. It's not like this place hasn't existed or the need for driver level support for surround gaming wasn't needed. It's taken nVidia a better part of a decade to merely acknowledge there is a market for this and only grudgingly after ATI rubbed their noses in it. After watching the CES nVidia keynote stream last night it's become apparent that nVidia is playing catch up on this front and simply doesn't get the audience. They're doing it to feature match ATI, not to actually appease us users after all of this time.

IMHO, nVidia simply doesn't understand the surround gaming market yet. In many ways ATI still doesn't either though. ATI, nVidia and Matrox all still have a learning curve to achieve the needs and understanding of the surround gaming community. While I see Matrox and ATi reaching out in an attempt to better find out the needs of everyone nVidia is just now coming out with 3DVS to the consumer and we still don't yet have a public community rep that is active around here. I wish nVidia rep would be less of a forum lurker and more of a forum poster...

:hide

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

Well, there is the HDMI port on the new cards, but only nVidia know at the minute whether that has it's own timing/controller and is thus independent of the DVI ports...

Well, there is the HDMI port on the new cards, but only nVidia know at the minute whether that has it's own timing/controller and is thus independent of the DVI ports...

With the compatability with 200-series I can almost bet that GF100 cards are also just 2 port out enabled. I couldn't see them shifting to a 3 port out model and still maintaining compatability with GT200 cards. You'll get no complaints out of me though about multi-card requirement. I'd just as soon be able to shove as many cards in a computer as we have slots and have it scale in a linear manner. I can dream I guess. :wink:

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

[quote]Well, there is the HDMI port on the new cards, but only nVidia know at the minute whether that has it's own timing/controller and is thus independent of the DVI ports...

With the compatability with 200-series I can almost bet that GF100 cards are also just 2 port out enabled. I couldn't see them shifting to a 3 port out model and still maintaining compatability with GT200 cards. You'll get no complaints out of me though about multi-card requirement. I'd just as soon be able to shove as many cards in a computer as we have slots and have it scale in a linear manner. I can dream I guess. :wink:

I also like the thought of being able to just add cards. If you had three cards, each would be driving its own display. I'm sure that's way easier on the system than one card trying to do all the work. I'll probably buy a third if this is the case. What a great week! I can't wait to hear more.

I'm sure that's way easier on the system than one card trying to do all the work. I'll probably buy a third if this is the case. What a great week! I can't wait to hear more.

Depends upon the mechanics of how it's processed. If it has to push a lot of pixels through the PCIe bus to pull it off, the more displays + the more cards used might = faster degredation of hardware horsepower. Everything is all massive speculation at the moment. I don't think many people know about the inner working of it yet. It looks to be so recent a development I think the feature set is still being figured out. My bet is what we actually saw demoed was SLI Mosaic mode enabled on new hardware and they don't have much to show yet for the actual new consumer version.

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

So 1 card is going to process 2 monitors, and the second card is going to process 1 monitor?

So 1 card is going to process 2 monitors, and the second card is going to process 1 monitor?

That does seem to be the case. However since it would be running in SLI. I would think the load would be split between the two cards or three to power the 3 displays if it was treated as one resolution/display.

So 1 card is going to process 2 monitors, and the second card is going to process 1 monitor?

Merely being plugged into a card doesn't always mean the GPU on that particular card is doing all the processing. It's too early to say how load balancing is handled. I think we'd all be jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions if we merely guessed at how the mechanics worked and took that as fact. We'll know in short order one way or the other though.

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