Nvidia4 SLI and Gelato - Future use?

[ktamiola]

Hi...

First of all You would have to buy Quadro series graphics card to use Gelato (As far as I know there are no soft mods avalible that would allow You to mod 6600GT or 6800 in SLI mode to quadro equivalent).

I have used some futures of Gelato and it appears to work - especially when You have quite complicated scenes with multiple objects - for example army ... I have rendered (dual Opteron 250, biosmoded Quadro FX 4000 2GB ram ) the scene with 5000 soldiers (low poly) on the simple battlefield and it worked very fast in comparision with batch network renderer by XSI... (on a 4 dual Xeon nodes).

However if You need more information, simply go to the website and search for the technical notes... As far as I know it gives great scalability if You have cards running in genlock mode, but I do not suppose You to buy Quadro FX 4400 ... Correct me if I am wrong...

Good luck ...

[novadude]

The BIOS flash should work on SLI cards, you just have to flash each one.

[ktamiola]

Well...

If it works (and You can prove it somehow - proper link to the forum or www would do the trick) I'm gonna buy myself an SLI and 2xGeforce 6800 PCie.

As far as I know, there is HSI protection in new PCIE based cards (a small chip that serves only one purpose - proper identfication and detection of hardware by OS) and it makes flashing almost imposible.

Your move :rolleyes:

[TapioKa]

Good point on the Quadro cards.

Actually, I would love if companies like Discreet, Alias, Softimage, etc. could create plugins that could leverage GPU's to aid in rendering. That to me seems like a great idea, coupled with using something like SLI would make those cards even more useful.

:)

[beaker]

Hi...

First of all You would have to buy Quadro series graphics card to use Gelato (As far as I know there are no soft mods avalible that would allow You to mod 6600GT or 6800 in SLI mode to quadro equivalent).Gelato does not require a Quadro, it is just the only card that is supported. You can still run Gelato under a regular Geforce card. They just don't support it if you have any problems.

[beaker]

Just a quick note that Mental Ray does support hardware shadows from the video card and opengl accelerated shaders.

[SOPLAND]

I doubt you are going to see a remarkable improvement using Gelato on an SLI setup. The few benchmarks I've seen of SLI setups point to them giving you about 50 percent better fillrate than a single card and little to no help anywhere else. Gelato isn't fillrate intensive so it probably wouldn't be too wise to hope for anything spectacular from an SLI setup in Gelato. Of course since Nvidia makes both the hardware and the software it's possible they may make better use of an SLI setup than your run of the mill game or synthetic benchmark, but no matter how well they utilize the hardware you are going to get diminishing returns.

Also you have to understand Gelato really isn't all that fast. Yes you will see an improvement over Mental Ray in some scenes, but Gelato can only offload so much onto the GPU, it still relies on the CPU quite a bit.

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