Date:
Thursday , October 27, 2005
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA SLI - Ready for Mainstream?

Does NVIDIA's latest ForceWare driver update show that SLI is truly coming of age? We take a real-world look at just what SLI is capable of now days.

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The SLI Upgrade - Software

Once the physical installation was done, I moved onto loading the drivers. I had previously uninstalled the NVIDIA display drivers through the control panel and subsequently run Driver Cleaner, although the latter is not required, it seemed like a good idea after years of reading about driver compatibility problems in our Video Card Forums. Before installing the new v81.85 ForceWare drivers for the SLI video cards, I also made sure I had the latest chipset drivers for my AMD processor equipped nForce 4 Ultra motherboard. If you are running an SLI setup on an Intel processor equipped nForce 4 Ultra motherboard, you will also want to make sure you have the proper driver.

I installed the v81.85 ForceWare drivers and rebooted the system as suggested and I was greeted with the following message below upon entering the OS:

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Once I clicked on the above message as prompted, I was taken directly to the NVIDIA control panel screen where I could select the “Enable SLI multi-GPU” check box. After doing that and selecting my primary display for SLI, I was prompted to reboot again.

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After that, I was done with my SLI video card upgrade.

SLI NOW

Looking at NVIDIA’s SLI hardware and software as a whole, it has come a long way since its introduction so long ago. SLI has matured into a product that certainly has more mainstream market appeal. The fact is that SLI is now easier to implement and it provides greater benefits than ever before.

SLI Game Profiles

Tons of game profiles have been added to the SLI drivers. In fact, so many profiles have been added that I don’t really see a lack of game profiles as an issue any more. NVIDIA driver engineers have been burning the midnight oil to make sure games that can benefit from SLI do so. That said, do not expect every game that hits the market to have a specialized SLI profile for it the moment it hits the shelves, but one should not be far behind, especially if you are talking about a title that has any momentum. A good example of this can be seen in the fact that Quake 4 support appeared only days after the game went to retail.

Other recent games such as Serious Sam 2 and F.E.A.R. both reward the SLI user with image quality and performance advantages, even though there is not a specific profile in the ForceWare driver for either game. NVIDIA’s SLI has been around long enough now that game developers themselves are adding support for SLI into their games. As such, we’re likely to see a bigger payoff in terms of performance gains as soon as games are released. These games are being designed with SLI in mind, rather than us having to rely on an NVIDIA engineering team to retroactively add SLI support.

Multi-Display Support & Reboots

Multi-display support with the current 80 series ForceWare drivers is so much more robust than in the past, and this alone was a big reason why I decided to go ahead and upgrade my personal system to an SLI video configuration. With the current ForceWare, SLI should easily support a 4-display setup should you have the need for it. Note that I also tried putting another NVIDIA PCI video card into the mix to give me 6-display functionality, but the drivers were not happy with that configuration. Configuring 6 displays will probably not be an issue for many users, but I think it is one worth mentioning. The fact that you can utilize SLI without having to reboot makes the setup much easier to accept. One thing that I would like see is the ability for nView profiles to save my full monitor setup in terms of which monitors are enabled and how they are positioned. As of right now, the nView profiles do not work this way. When coming out of SLI mode, you have to re-enable and reposition your displays in the control panel. While this is certainly not hard to do, it would be nice to make this a nView profile operation (if possible).

One issue worth mentioning here is that SLI has had problems with widescreen displays in the past. I don't have any personal experience with this issue, but most of the problems seem to have been ironed out from the research I have done. So while SLI does look like a good match for widescreen displays, I would highly suggest looking around the Net for issues with SLI and the particular widescreen display you are thinking of using.

Now the downside to this “Easy On / Easy Off SLI” is the fact that after about a week of beating on it, it has broken on my machine. I can no longer go into SLI mode without rebooting, and, even worse, I cannot get the SLI mode to disengage. I now have to reinstall the v81.85 ForceWare drivers to get back to using my multi-display setup. Talking to NVIDIA, they have not encountered my issue before in their testing, so this is something that we will be working through with them. However, NVIDIA did point out that it was mentioned in their v81.85 ForceWare release notes that “Attempts to enable SLI dynamically occasionally fails, requiring a system reboot.” Therefore, overall, there are some small bugs still in the SLI driver, but I think that most people are having very good results with the 81.85 version of ForceWare. After a full driver uninstall and an execution of Driver Cleaner, my v81.85 ForceWare is once again working correctly in that it is allowing me to enable SLI and disable it without rebooting my machine. Still, I would like to see the customizable nView profiles fully reconfigure my multiple displays correctly when I exit SLI. That said, this small inconvenience is a trivial price to pay for the gaming enjoyment that SLI provides.

UPDATE 10/27/05-15:03 - As of this afternoon, the just released v81.87 BETA ForceWare driver seems to have fixed my desktop profile issue for the most part, although it does not put my icons back on the proper monitor. As for moving dynamically in and out of SLI mode, that is working well too now, as it did at first with the v81.85 drivers. We will see how it does over a period of weeks and update here.

Mis-Matched Card Capabilities

One of the major roadblocks for SLI originally was the fact that you had to have matching video cards to use it. Worse still, early SLI adopters not only had to worry about the brand of the cards they were using, but also the BIOS versions for those cards. Today’s SLI is much different. While it is my opinion that NVIDIA still has a major hand in making sure SLI-able cards are up to spec, I picked two very different cards to put into my SLI rig. As mentioned above, I’m happy to say that an EVGA 7800 GTX and an MSI 7800 GTX are working well together. Keep in mind that these two cards do not even share the same default GPU and RAM speeds. In spite of the fact that the cards are from different manufacturers, and that they run at different GPU and RAM speeds, rest assured that they -- as NVIDIA promised -- work very well together.

Note: You must still use two graphics cards that have the same GPU model. For example, a GeForce 7800 GT must be matched with another GeForce 7800 GT (not with a GeForce 7800 GTX or a GeForce 6800 Ultra).

Sliding Prices & Upgrade Path

I have had my SLI capable motherboard for quite some time now without the second PCIe slot populated. I knew at some point in the future, SLI would likely become more desirable to me, so I went ahead and made sure an nForce 4 SLI chipset motherboard was in my case. With the prices of SLI capable motherboards and SLI capable video cards coming down all the time, you might keep an SLI upgrade in mind even if you know that at the current time it is not an affordable option. But certainly make sure and keep your long-term upgrade path in mind. SLI might be something that is much more affordable a year down the road, and, by that time, you might be in "need" of another video card to play some of the games that you want experience. Even if you never truly take advantage of the performance advantages that SLI delivers, with an SLI capable motherboard, you now have an extra PCIe slot that can be easily populated with an inexpensive video card that will allow a multiple display setup in your future.

The Bottom Line

There is something about owning an SLI setup that just gets your testosterone flowing. Undoubtedly, SLI was brought back with the hardcore enthusiast in mind. Yes, there have been system builders selling it as well, but we all know that the mass market in this niche has been me and you, the computer hardware enthusiast crowd. With ForceWare v81.85’s release, NVIDIA's SLI is now all grown up. SLI has not only just gotten even more attractive to the enthusiast; it has also matured to the point of really spilling over into other markets. NVIDIA SLI is truly ready for a mainstream audience. SLI has reached a new level of simplicity with ForceWare v81.85. Also keep in mind that costs for quality SLI capable motherboards are now well under th US$150 price point, and that price points for SLI capable video cards stretch from US$100 to US$599. What I think started out as a very expensive marketing tool, may truly pay off in the end -- not only for NVIDIA but also for mainstream computer users.

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