Quote (Darius Greywind @ Feb. 12 2005, 11:30 pm) |
nVidia's SLI is designed to dynamically load-balance alternate frames or partial frames between two rendering engines. Meaning that games can take advantage of it, even if its not a 100% improvement. nVidia's drivers are what Gigabyte has to use for their single card implementation. The advantage is, you dont need to shell out for 2 GF6600's, nor do you have to deal with the heat that generates, or the space it takes up. |
Quote (Darius Greywind @ Feb. 13 2005, 1:05 am) |
nVidia develops all the drivers for their chips now. Gigabyte can only use the ones they supply. They're paranoid about giving out any sort of details on how their chips work these days. This is annoying if you're using Linux, since nVidia's drivers dont work with most Linux installs properly. There's no actual difference between putting both cores on one card, as far as the system is concerned. The link is exactly the same as using their cable to connect two regular 6600's. |
Quote (Darius Greywind @ Feb. 13 2005, 7:09 pm) |
Actually... nVidia's SLI only uses the frame buffer of one card. So two 128mb 6600's means only 128mb of frame buffer. And that doesnt change either with Gigabyte's card. Yes, wasteful, isnt it? And two cards in SLI use one x8 PCI-E channel each. Gigabyte's card uses x16 from one slot total. PCI-E can split up like that, which is cool in some ways. |