wht is software sli

[davegraham]

in the dark ages of SLI, you were required to use an SLI electrical "bridge" (a short cable connecting two cards) in order to signal the cards to act in SLI mode.

nowadays, the hardware bridge is less of a requirement since the software DRIVERS can initiate SLI crosstalk.

current generation 8xxx series cards (possibly even the 7xxx series) from nVidia and all the new ATI Crossfire cards can do this.

cheers,

Dave

[BOXXlabs]

Hi Guys,

I'm pretty sure you can't enable true SLI mode on latest NVIDIA cards without the hardware SLI bridge connector.

We have 8800's and 4600/5600 cards here and they require the over-the-top SLI bridge/bus connector in order to enable SLI mode in the drivers.

You can run in "multiview" mode (which is marketed as an SLI mode) without the bridge connector but you won't be able to do alternate frame rendering or get SLI AA modes enabled...

Unless they changed it recently... Maybe I need to run more tests...

Adam
BOXXlabs

[BOXXlabs]

anyways, there are no pro apps of consequence that can take advantage of SLI (or Crossfire) technology...

[davegraham]

Adam,

I'll have to check into that as well as I was pretty damn sure nVidia was pushing to do away with hardware bridges. (perhaps that's one good thing that ATI has done lately...)

thanks for the correction.

dave

[lots]

It could be marketed as "Software SLI" if the logic that determines if SLI mode is enabled or not is controlled by a circuit rather than one of those flip cards...

Just a thought..

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