Nvidia : better in SLI with Vista ? (page 1: Introduction)

Launched roughly 3 years ago, Nvidia’s multi-GPU technology hasn’t undergone any major evolution except for a constant maturing of its drivers. The SLI brand on the other hand has in its own way evolved to somewhat represent THE platform for gamers. Or at least this has been Nvidia’s commercial strategy, which however hasn’t really succeeded in convincing users who remain largely ignorant of this facet. This is all the more true because certain aspects no longer concern multi-GPUs and cause more confusion than anything else. SLI memory?

SLI suffered from a number of setbacks due to errors on Nvidia’s part, notably its commercialization of a Quad-SLI which, besides its three benchmarks, didn’t really add any performance gains except in SLI AA. More than anything else, this was show of bad taste. Added to this was the quality of drivers that really weren’t always up to par. More specifically, Nvidia had accumulated delays at the beginning of 2007 with Vista and DirectX 10 leading to a significant amount of additional work that they hadn’t really planned on.

Today, Nvidia holds to its discourse that the situation has improved. Andrew Fear, Software Product Manager at Nvidia, announced by iPod that the latest beta drivers noticeably improve SLI functioning in Windows Vista. This supposedly reproduces the «experience» offered in XP by a similar one with Microsoft’s latest operating system.

With the upcoming arrival of new chipsets for which the platform aspect is very important for sales, Nvidia is trying to reaffirm SLI’s good standing. This is all the more so an effort now that a "tri-SLI" is on the way and confidence in its drivers will be an essential aspect in forgetting the failure of the Quad-SLI.

The test

We therefore decided to run some tests on these drivers to see if there were tangible improvements behind this announcement. The platform used was based on an nForce 680i, equipped with a Core 2 Extreme QX6850, 2 GB of memory and the two GeForce 8800 Ultras tested in 1920x1440. Of course, all Windows Vista updates were installed. For Vista, we evaluated the 162.22 WHQL, 163.67 beta, 163.69 WHQL and 163.71 beta drivers. For Windows XP, we used the 163.71 WHQL version.