Spider SLI?

[paybackdaman]

When is Nvidia gonna put out a chip that supports SLI and the spider architecture? I know this month there is to be the 8000 series, but all of the motherboards I have seen support the 5200mt/s but do not support SLI.

[intel igent]

i dont think that will ever happen

[Xazax]

Spider platform was coined by ATI/AMD Refering on how you can "cross-mistach" different cards, like the HD 3850 CF'ed with an HD 3870 or with a HD 3870x2....

Nvidia will more then likely never do this, simply because of the way SLI works.. it takes Two Graphics and has them render using AFR(Alternate Frame Rendering) or what SLI speifically does, SFR(one card renders the top portion, one renders the bottom). CF on the other hand can Scale up to 8+ cards, because the cards Divide the work load of the rendered scene in something like a checkerboard pattern.

[WhiteLotus]

the way SLI works.. it takes Two Graphics and has them render using AFR(Alternate Frame Rendering) or what SLI speifically does, SFR(one card renders the top portion, one renders the bottom). CF on the other hand can Scale up to 8+ cards, because the cards Divide the work load of the rendered scene in something like a checkerboard pattern.

that's a very interesting insight - i often thought what the difference between the two were - other than just a name.

[Xazax]

"CrossFire (also CrossFire X after release of the Spider desktop platform on November 19, 2007) is a brand name for ATI Technologies' multi-GPU solution, which competes with Scalable Link Interface (SLI) from NVIDIA. The technology allows up to four graphics cards to be used in a single computer to improve graphics performance."

"Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by Nvidia for linking two or more video cards together to produce a single output. SLI is an application of parallel processing for computer graphics, meant to increase the processing power available for graphics."
..."Split Frame Rendering (SFR), the first rendering method. This analyzes the rendered image in order to split the workload 50/50 between the two GPUs. To do this, the frame is split horizontally in varying ratios depending on geometry. For example, in a scene where the top half of the frame is mostly empty sky, the dividing line will lower, balancing geometry workload between the two GPUs. This method does not scale geometry or work as well as AFR, however." (Speific to Nvidia and SLI ONLY)

(Sources Taken from Wikipedia.com)

You can google the rest.. and see how CF really works but from my understanding its far better then Nvidia's, it just hasnt gotten the marketing Nvidias SLI has.