| Hybrid SLI |
| Written by John M |
|
Nvidia took advantage of CES to officially announce, yet again, their next step in SLI technology. I guess that makes for a formal engagement, but no wedding date folks. They plan for an entire family of GPUs and compatible chipsets to be made available this year, starting with the nForce 780a SLI, nForce 750a SLI and nForce 730a for AMD processors (expected right away), then the 8200 series with DirectX 10 support and, in Q2, products for the Intel platform. But, what is Hybrid SLI all about? If you haven't read already, this new version of SLI will allow the system to use the processing power of the IGP. HybridPower will shut down the discrete graphics card when not playing, and GeForce Boost will kick in when both the integrated and discrete GPUs are needed. The people at Bit-tech talked to nVidia representatives about some of their products for 2008, Hybrid SLI in particular. What they found out is that, by summer, all nVidia based motherboards (be they for Intel or AMD processors) will incorporate a GPU. With one of those boards, a Geforce graphics card and Windows Vista, you will be able to use both HybridPower and GeForce Boost. HybridPower, requires the monitor to be plugged in to the motherboard's VGA output and puts a question mark on multi-monitor configurations. At the same time, all the bandwith PCI-Express 2.0 provides will be welcome to move all the information on the frame buffer to and from main system memory. Regarding GeForce Boost, nVidia said they won't be implementing it on high end graphics cards anytime soon (you don't want your almighty 8800 trailing behind because of that IGP snail) but it will work with graphics cards already on sale like the 8500 GT and the 8400 GS (HybridPower won't, though). Link: X-bit labs.
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