Twin Graphics cards

[volf]

Question for any hardcore PC gamers out there.

I've seen before some PCs with twin graphic cards installed. This is worth doing? Any Pro's and Con's? And how would you set this sort of thing up?

[Scott]

setup is piece of p1ss, just pllug two in, switch over jumpers/swith on motherboard, link cards together with little briding board.

then in nvidia settings click "SLI" and bobs your uncle.

Not all programs can make use of SLI mode however...

[Sheaf]

Is it me or are things going backwards these days?

I mean, back in the day, when we got our 200mmx PC, you'd buy something like a 4mb ATi card. However if you were nto games you'd buy a 3DFX card (we got a 6mb pure3D card which was apparently the top one at the time - woo), which you'd have to link to the normal PCI card (via a small VGA link IIRC).

Anyway, a few years passed and they were classed as old hat, you'd go and buy an all in one card... 2 cards? Nah, that's just silly... you can just buy an uber card that does it all. So, we had our 500mhz PC with a 32TNT card - yay.

Now, it seems to have been decided that apparently 1 card isn't enough any more and we should go back to having two cards and linking them. Hmmm... deja vous.

I know the reasons are good, and it actually does make sense, plus they work in parallel rather than one doing the 3d imaging after, plus it's easier to upgrade and doesn't mean you scrap your old card etc etc etc, but still, I cant help finding it amusing that we're back where we were about 10 years ago.


P.S. I'm still annoyed that although thr Pure3D card was actually rather competent it was imcomatible with sooo much stuff including Screamer Rally which I really liked Stupid D3D/Glide/OpenGL battle.

[Scott]

The way in which the 2 cards work together was different back then.

I to had 2x voodoo 3000 cards , linked by VGA cable. This worked by one card rendering alternative lines (effectively doubling the rendering ability). This was quite ineficient as both cards still had to process the entire scene for exmaple.

The link between newer graphics cards is such that the 'bus' between the 2 cards means they can share memory and GPU between themselves, offering closer to double the throughput than having 2 cards working independantly on the same 'scene'.

As you can imagin, competing standards dont always help the end user, despite the ideals of alternative standards etc.

Could you imagin a world without microsoft, but with about 10 companies all taking up 10% of the market share? What the end user benefits from such 'monoplies' is sometimes taken for granted IMO.

[-Alex-]

Options are SLi from Nvidia or Crossfire from ATi.
You will need a specific type of motherboard for each of the above setups (SLi - nforce chipset, ATi Intel Chipsets).

Pro's - better performance, mainly limited by drivers - "scaling", the main gains in performance can be seen when the resolution gets high. Where single cards run out of puff, the double-setups do not. I read an article recently on TomsHardware that inferred you should expect a MAXIMUM of 65-70% gains in performance at the high resolutions, more like 55% in normal use. I don't know where they got these figures from but top-end benchmarks to tend to be disappointing for such high cost setups, but still impressive considering the amount of pixels being rendered with such effects being turned up to max. (AntiAliasing and Anistrophic Filtering, motion blur and HDR in particular).

Con's - expense, extra heat if you're heavily into overclocking. Keep in mind that if you sell the setup in a year or two, that you will lose twice the money you would have done on a single card.

Some manufacturers produce dual-card setups on one board now - eg. ATi 4870x2 (which is essentially 2 ATi Radeon 4870's running CrossFire on the same board). Nvidia do a 9800GX2 which is similar.

I run 4870 GDDR5 crossfire, and it's been good enough for everything I need (22" widescreen monitor running native resolution of 1680 x 1050) at very high/ultra high. Crysis DirectX10 ultra high is a joy to behold.

Make sure that your PCiE slots can run full speed (x16 simultaneously) for best results.
You need to be careful that your CPU and RAM can feed the cards at their maximum rate, otherwise you will bottleneck it and the extra power at the GFX will be wasted. My overclocked E6600 @ 3.2ghz can just about feed the crossfire 4870 at 100% activity on both cards. it does drop to 90% on each board when I run outlook for example at the same time as folding@home.

Given the market today I'd be looking towards the 4870x2 or more likely the Nvidia GTX 280.
Both can be classed "powerhouse" and will do the job you want unless you are going mental with the resolution.

[Phoenix3dfx225]

Lets not also forget x3 cards is now the future, or if you buy a card as mentioned above like a gx2 where its two card bolted together into one. You can run technically a quad card setup.

However I am currently running a Nvidia GTX280 OC2 which is the lastest card on the market and it eats up anything I throw at it on max settings. So the need for another or two to make three is surplus to requirements at the moment.

Then if you are also running one or more high end card, the rest of the system has to be in top form as well to be able to feed it the data quick enough. Not enough bandwidth within the rest of the system makes a fast card not as fast as it can be.

[smile]

it's all about cost efficiency and thermal limits, they can't make CPU's any faster or they'll explode heh, so the natural thing is to start looking into multiples to make up for it

[Bikernut]

I to had 2x voodoo 3000 cards , linked by VGA cable. This worked by one card rendering alternative lines (effectively doubling the rendering ability).

.

I think you mean Voodoo 2 there.(ahhh memories)
Voodoo 3 wasn`t SLI compatable.Voodoo 4/5 re-introduced SLI with upto 4 units per card (6000)

[Phoenix3dfx225]

ahh the voodoo2 with either 8mb or 12mb of video ram and a resolution of 800x600 unless it was sli and it could support 1024x768

Still got some in my cupboard!

[shen]

Is it me or are things going backwards these days?

I mean, back in the day, when we got our 200mmx PC, you'd buy something like a 4mb ATi card. However if you were nto games you'd buy a 3DFX card (we got a 6mb pure3D card which was apparently the top one at the time - woo), which you'd have to link to the normal PCI card (via a small VGA link IIRC).

Anyway, a few years passed and they were classed as old hat, you'd go and buy an all in one card... 2 cards? Nah, that's just silly... you can just buy an uber card that does it all. So, we had our 500mhz PC with a 32TNT card - yay.

Now, it seems to have been decided that apparently 1 card isn't enough any more and we should go back to having two cards and linking them. Hmmm... deja vous.

No mate..it's you

one card does do it all but two of those cards does it all quicker
If you've got silly money to spend and understand the fact that the graphics cards you buy are the best technologically that at the present time is possible then the only way to go quicker is to have two of them to halve the effort and double the performance in theory.

For hardcore people only of course but there you go

[rovex]

Now more than ever 2 cards are worth it (or a dual GPU card). Im running a 4870X2 now with the 8.12 betas and the new Avivo converter. It converts a 45GB BR to a 4.3GB .MKV in about 15 mins. You have to be an ATI developer member to get it though.

[Phoenix3dfx225]

abit like nvidias badaboom software then that also converts video formats from full glory to say something playable on a mobile device via the gfx card

[rovex]

Yes, except the badaboom software is seriously unreliable and rather picky about what it will convert. The Avivo is much more stable (so far) and a bit more usable, and faster to

[TomcatDan]

Don't forget power. I built a gaming rig for one of the engineers here with 2x 1GB 9800 GX2's, 2x Core 2 Quad Extremes (3Ghz per core ) and 8GB of RAM, plus the usual compliment of HDD's and burners. He assured me that his PSU whe wanted to reuse was 1200W but when it wouldn't power up and I looked a bit closer (which was hard as there were no labels on it) it turned out it was a 650. If you start chucking in SLi and Quad Cores/Dual Cores you NEED a decent power supply, and it's worth getting the best you can afford if you want the machine to be stable.

Note - you do not need a machine anywhere near the specs listed here, to be frank that box was ridiculous... He spent £700 on each CPU FFS!

[Tom™]

gtx 295 ftw

[Phoenix3dfx225]

Aye did the gtx 295 actually make it out in the shops today. I've been waiting for ages for something that will put my gtx 280 out of date, cos when a friend bought a 8800gtx it was just shockingly good, but in a very short space of time the 9 series came out followed by the 280gtx.... then nothing for almost a year.

[Tom™]

tbh 9 series is just 8 series, yes some changes.. but nothing special

8800 ultra and gtx 285 are good cards

295 is good if you want a simple dual solution

[Phoenix3dfx225]

the option for quad sli

[Tom™]

the option for quad sli

if it wasn't for gym membership i would have twin 295's