Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Grey Wolf on October 29, 2005, 01:20:41 pm
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http://theinquirer.net/?article=27300
Sorry that it's a link from the Inquirer, but it's all I had.
As for the actual news: Isn't this getting a bit insane?
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4-card SLI = 4* profit.
Or something. I predict they'll soon be pushing 8, 16 and 32 card setups!
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32 cards 100W each thats 3200 W PSU .... i want one
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I saw a picture of that setup earlier...
Mmmmmm.
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If only they'd get on and revolutionise the way it's done like they really should. Ah well...
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Pretty cool. There is this Gigabyte board (http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20051004/index.html) that supports four video cards, so these drivers are probably designed for that.
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Who in thier right mind NEEDS that sort of power? I say wait for dedicated physics cards to take more strain off of the GPU, and go THAT route. I mean, 4 videocards, drawing THAT much power, isnt going to be cheap on the electrics when it comes down to it.
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I'd want it for the 10 display option, perhaps. That is, if I were filthy rich. Think about it. Hook up one or two high-res beamers for projections, then make a field with 8 TFT's arranged in two layers and something circle like.... No more issues with lack of space, ever.
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I just think it's absolutely unnecessary for home users and gamers. You dont need that much power to play games. I can see the setup working for server environments where you need to hook up multiple monitors to one machine and such, but come on...
If games on the PC are going to start requiring an SLI setup.. I'll start looking at consoles before I have to start buying four (even two, I just don see the need!!!) videocards just to play the latest games.
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Originally posted by Nix
I just think it's absolutely unnecessary for home users and gamers. You dont need that much power to play games. I can see the setup working for server environments where you need to hook up multiple monitors to one machine and such, but come on...
If games on the PC are going to start requiring an SLI setup.. I'll start looking at consoles before I have to start buying four (even two, I just don see the need!!!) videocards just to play the latest games.
It's worrying, isn't it? I just bought X3 Reunion yesterday and after some major system tweaking I finally managed to get it to run at a playable framerate on my humble 9800 Pro. When I looked at the forums it was clear the problem is widespread, and on much higher specced machines than my own. When people with GF6800s and AMD64 3000s start having framerate issues on medium and low graphics settings, you know developers are pushing the envelope too far. A few years ago things were substantially different - games would be designed to run on low-end cards and were more scaleable for the higher-end setups. If anyone is wondering why the PC gaming industry is slumping, this would be a good place to start.
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Originally posted by Nix
Who in thier right mind NEEDS that sort of power? I say wait for dedicated physics cards to take more strain off of the GPU, and go THAT route. I mean, 4 videocards, drawing THAT much power, isnt going to be cheap on the electrics when it comes down to it.
AGEIA is going to have hard time pushing their physics processors to the masses, as the latest GPU's already have more or less hardware capability to hardware accelerate physics calculations. Such features will gain more importance in upcoming GPU's. It is far more likely to have both GPU and PPU in a single chip.
Moreso, it has been planned that sometime in the future graphics cards are socket mounted to motherboards like CPU's are today. If there are such plans for socket mountable graphics cards, I can only wonder if there's enough room for socket mountable APU's (Audio Processing Units). :)
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Or maybe we'll start to see integrated game controllers, that link physics, video, and audio cards into one low-latency device.
Saves on drivers, and all the operations could be done on the card, and devs would have fewer combos of hardware to work with....Basically, a mini-console.
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Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Or maybe we'll start to see integrated game controllers, that link physics, video, and audio cards into one low-latency device.
Saves on drivers, and all the operations could be done on the card, and devs would have fewer combos of hardware to work with....Basically, a mini-console.
I don't think that will come true. NVIDIA's nForce motherboards where northbridge and southbridge are on same chip, presents higher development costs to produce successors for the chip. As you have seen from other motherboards, many use older southbridge combined with newer northbridge which saves money. Continuous development of a chip that integrates GPU, APU and PPU into one, cost most likely would be very high.
In the end, it is universally better approach to have a low-latency and high-bandwidth system bus which connects CPU, RAM, GPU, APU and any other devices. Then you only need to replace one of those if it becomes outdated. If you have one chip and only GPU becomes outdated, you'll end up paying more to buy another new chip that has it all.
And consoles are out there if you want one. No need to make PC another console.
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I just think it's absolutely unnecessary for home users and gamers. You dont need that much power to play games. I can see the setup working for server environments where you need to hook up multiple monitors to one machine and such, but come on...
I would buy it if I won the lottery or something. :D I could play pretty much every game at 2048x1536 with 8xTSAA and pull 80fps minimum framerates (well maybe not in FEAR, but that game is messed up). You can buy four 7800 GTs for about $1300 these days, which isn't too far off from an FX57's price, so it's not totally off the wall.
AGEIA is going to have hard time pushing their physics processors to the masses, as the latest GPU's already have more or less hardware capability to hardware accelerate physics calculations. Such features will gain more importance in upcoming GPU's. It is far more likely to have both GPU and PPU in a single chip.
yeah, in fact ATI has said that its X1800 cards will have this capability in the future. There is also a third party compiler available for doing vector computations on nvidia cards.