Hello, Future. I believe we’ve met before, in the past. nVidia has announced SLI for the GeForce 6800 series of PCI Express video cards. What does that mean for you, the already broke-ass gamer? Well, if you buy one of the new, expensive Intel motherboards with the Tumwater chipset, you can connect two of Nvidia’s top-end, $500 video cards together via a “Scalable Link Interface” MIO port, harnessing the power of both cards simultaneously to render game graphics. It won’t be twice as fast; the received wisdom is around 50 percent faster than a single card, although Nvidia is claiming up to 90 percent faster frame rates in some situations.
Although it might be easy to brush off SLI as a toy for rich gamers who can drop $5,000 on a gaming rig without a second thought (and you’d be right, at the moment), in the near future the SLI will offer a handy way to boost the performance of your existing card — just toss another one in there and go. Unfortunately, if history is any reference, by the time a second 6800 becomes affordable, buying a whole new, next-generation video card is probably a better option.
No word if this is the same technology that Alienware was touting around E3. It would certainly make more sense if it were, as Alienware isn’t exactly known for pioneering cutting edge video hardware solutions. Looking at the pictures of Alienware’s solution, the interconnects do look different, so maybe they figured out some magic of their own after all.
Read [HardwareAnalysis via /.]
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