Date:
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA's SLI Shortchanges Gamers?

According to NVIDIA’s marketing, NVIDIA’s Scalable Link Interface (SLI) "can deliver as much as 2x the performance of a single GPU configuration for unparalleled gaming experiences." What NVIDIA fails to make clear, however, is that SLI currently requires NVIDIA to write driver profiles for each game to support SLI. Are all the games you want to play supported?

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Conclusions

SLI is a great idea, but we are finding that its current implementation is lacking. There is a lot of room for maturity, which is of course expected. Right now, SLI will only benefit you if you play the games on the SLI support list. If you go out and spend a thousand dollars on an SLI setup, your money will be totally wasted if you play a game that doesn’t have an SLI profile ready. Instead, you will have wasted your money as you will just be playing with one GPU instead of 2. In the future, NVIDIA might release a profile for your game. Maybe.

We see a possible huge problem here for those gamers that have shelled out the big bucks on SLI gaming systems. And although HardOCP has heavily championed NVIDIA’s SLI, the overall lack of support for many games is a great concern to us. We were under the impression that SLI automatically defaulted to AFR rendering when there was no driver profile present, but that is clearly not the case from our testing.

So what happens when STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Age of Empires III, F.E.A.R, Battlefield 2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Rainbow Six 4, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, KOTOR II, or Gothic 3 etc. are released? Do we get SLI support as soon as each of those games is released, or does it come later? And how much later? 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, 6 months? Does SLI support appear at all??? What about the games out now that could benefit from SLI, such as World of Warcraft, Everquest II, NFSU2, Chronicles of Riddick? With NVIDIA’s past driver record, it could take several months at least for SLI profile support, if it ever comes for a certain game. By that time we know many gaming enthusiasts will have completed the newer games. And what about older games? Will NVIDIA ever add SLI support for them?

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is NVIDIA is going to have to kick it up several notches on the driver side if they want SLI to impact the marketplace. The optimal solution is to make it so SLI is completely transparent to games so they don’t have to create a profile for each game allowing SLI to “just work.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case, as NVIDIA has to test each game and determine if AFR or SFR works best and then make a driver profile. So, if that is what they have to do, then NVIDIA really needs to step it up. A whole lot.

NVIDIA are going to have to commit to a frequent driver release schedule much like ATI. (Oh my how the tables have turned.) We do not think it is too much to ask for monthly driver updates, even if just beta, that support new SLI profiles for games. Perhaps NVIDIA could create some kind of profile update system where you can just download profiles that include SLI support for new games when they are released.

We also don’t think it is too much to ask for giving the end user the option to force AFR or SFR for every game, even if it doesn’t have an SLI profile. This way, we can enable for ourselves SLI in games that don’t have profiles yet to get the benefit of faster performance. If NVIDIA does not take these steps and instead falls back on their past poor frequency of driver releases, their once promising SLI technology could be doomed before it really ever gets any traction in the market.

Editor’s Addendum

We sent this story over to NVIDIA yesterday morning in order to allow them to be prepared for our editorial. Also we invited them to point out any errors pertaining to the facts as we have stated them. Our facts seem to be in order and to put it succinctly, NVIDIA PR seemed to agree with us on our thoughts surrounding SLI issues and informed us that new versions of SLI drivers are on the way.

NVIDIA also shared with us that they are in fact working on an application that allows for new SLI profiles to be installed automatically from the Web as we suggested above. Not stopping there, NVIDIA will soon be delivering instructions for end users that allow them to set rendering modes by creating their own application profiles. These instructions can currently be found on the next page of this editorial in their entirety. Thanks to NVIDIA for allowing our readers a “sneak peek.”

NVIDIA asked us to point out to our readers that we will find many games that scale nicely with SLI, sometimes even more than the application profile may suggest. However, in any particular game, if issues are found with even one level and how it works with SLI, then it is possible that NVIDIA Quality Assurance engineers will set the game’s profile to operate with only a single GPU while they are looking for a fix to the issues. So it is probable that some games we think should obviously be on the SLI list are waiting for proper SLI driver implementation. This is great to know but still leaves the SLI gamer with a useless SLI setup if their game is not “fixed” yet.

Now that we all know the facts, let’s wait and watch if NVIDIA puts the support behind their SLI that the people purchasing it deserve.

Please join us in the Video Card forum to further discuss these issues.