SLI: The 3D wave of the future is now!
Bio shock Infinite. Wow!
The future is here, and it’s never looked this good.
I remember in my younger days, playing a hefty amount of Battlefield 2 for the PC and thinking to myself: “This could look so much better.” At the time I was playing on a miserable Frankenstein of a machine, cobbled together from many previous fallen machines. A 60 GB HD from an old...
Bf2 on the Lowest settings. Ouch!
...Compaq, some mismatched RAM I had scavenged out of a tower that my sister gave me, and a junky looking tower with an AMD CPU and a miserable freebie graphics card. I had gotten tired of not being able to see far into the distance, miserable object rendering and even worse, the FPS was just miserable. A steady 17-20 fps is what I played with for several months. After enough yelling about lag, and groaning about the graphics stuttering, I finally broke down, and upgraded my graphics card. Enter the 8800 GT Alpha Dog Edition.
Awwwwww yeah! What a beast
I remember driving to Fry’s dow!n in Houston to go
pick this beautiful demon of a card up in 2008.
I can still remember how giddy I was at the cash register, looking over its sleek box and reading about all its amazing features. A new shader version, and an incredible 512 Megs of DDR3 Ram. As I left the building, cradling the black box in my arms like a precious child, or some delicate artifact. Little did I know I held the future of gaming graphics in my hands. This card was SLI Capable.
SLI Stands for Scalable Link Interface. Basically it’s a way to use 2, 3 or 4 graphics cards and use them to parallel process individual frames of a game, and split the workload amongst them. With this, the home game enthusiast can run even the most processor intensive games on the maximum graphics settings and achieve amazing frame rates.
Crysis 3 Promotional Picture.
Resistance is Futile! Four GeForce GTX Titans.
Click this link to see a PowerPoint presentation on how SLI works. It’s devilishly simple! For games like Crysis 3, which some consider to be the most strenuous test of a graphics system setup to date, SLI is not only just an option, it is a necessity in order for the game to reach its ultimate 3d potential. The differences are astounding. Click this link for SLI Benchmark comparisons. SLI Systems just have more processing capability, there is no question.
One of these days I’m going to break down and build a proper system. I have a hunch it will at least have dual SLI. – James Richard Morgan JR 2013.
Thanks to :
NVidia for creating this amazing processing architecture.
Tomshardware.com for SLI FPS rates with Crysis.
Youtube and Wikipedia for always being awesome.