Report : 1, 2 or 3 graphic cards? (page 2: The Quad SLI fiasco, is 3 better than 4 ?)

The Quad SLI fiasco

The arrival of triple SLI may bring back bad memories for some. Launched in partnership with Dell at the start of 2006, Quad SLI was made available to more partners in the following months, and finally there was free access at the beginning of summer of the same year with the arrival of the GeForce 7950 GX2. However, from the start this technology created a few concerns, because besides a few benchmarks, it wasn’t functional. In the beginning, we were told that drivers were too new and then later that Windows XP was at fault.

In fact, Quad SLI never really functioned. Its unfortunate owners were wonderfully misled and Nvidia’s justifications on the subject weren’t too convincing. In our opinion, the reason for this fiasco is that the marketing department decided to launch the technology too early in order to draw a maximum of interest; however, it was before having real visibility on the amount of work necessary to develop drivers that actually live up to this name. Nvidia must have realized that the required resources for their rapid development was too great compared to the small market that Quad SLI represented and they decided against it. The GeForce 8 was about to arrive as was Windows Vista creating an enormous development load which, as you may have understood, had priority.

So to lose time with a Quad SLI that was mainly meant to boost their image by having the current most powerful graphic rendering was thus out of the question. However, given that the products were already launched, Nvidia did not react and placed the fault on Windows XP in response to criticism. Even if this might have been true, feasibility should have been addressed before. To sell a technology, whatever it is, before it is functional is still unacceptable. And for this reason, the same fears returned with the arrival of 3-way SLI.

Is 3 better than 4 ?

It’s obvious that before launching 3-way SLI, Nvidia wanted to be sure to not fall in the same trap, all the more so that all eyes were on this manufacturer. So why should it work better now than 2 years ago? For several reasons.

A commonly mentioned one is that Windows Vista facilitates the division of images between more than two GPUs. This is probably the case but to a much smaller extent than what Nvidia would have us believe. For them this is a good pretext partly to rid themselves of the blame for the failure of Quad SLI and also for a drastic reduction in the investment in drivers destined for Windows XP. So for the moment, 3-way SLI is exclusive to Windows Vista.

In our opinion, the main reasons that 3-way SLI and even a "new" Quad SLI are more viable today can be summed up in 2 points. First of all, there are now more mature drivers which represent a real investment in terms of multi-GPU rendering as this is the way of the future. Second, games are taking into account multi-GPU systems more and more.

It therefore becomes increasingly possible to "simply" use AFR rendering in which the management of 2, 3 or even 4 GPUs is more or less the same. We are thus far from quad-SFR or an AFR of SFR which were the modes used with Quad SLI in 2006, or rather those that were announced but which Nvidia never really mastered.