Dual Graphics Cards: Gimmick?

[jpark]

/geek on

It's that time for me to upgrade my PC and I see the Dell gaming system offers a lot of "dual" technologies - one option is to have TWO graphics cards installed in the machine at the same time.  Is this a gimmick - can current games really take advantage of this option?

Back in the day when Mac clones were dual and quad systems - it was very clear that there were few software packages tweaked to take advantage of this parallel processing.  Today - I wonder - with this "hyper threading" is software now amenable to dual processing?

When I do upgrade - gonna make sure I have more RAM than Signe.  * beats his chest *

/geek off.

[Fabricated]

SLi is a gimmick. Don't bother. It works just fine with regular games, and a couple games have options to specifically take advantage of it, but it's simply not worth the money. One GeForce 7800GT still beats two SLi'd GeForce 6800's, and unless you shit gold bricks two 7800's are NOT worth it.

Dual-Core processors however may be a good future investment since they compare to single-core processors, and with both AMD and Intel starting to crank out dual-cores, you may actually see some games take real advantage of it (unlike Hyperthreading, which was largely ignored by developers).

[Trippy]

It's not a gimmick if you like to run games at very high resolutions (1600 x 1200+) and with AA and AF cranked up. For some games you don't quite get double the performance but it's within the ballpark. For others you only get more modest improvements.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2496&p=1
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/call_of_duty_2_performance_ati_nvidia/page9.asp
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/quake_4_high-end_performance/page10.asp

[Samwise]

can current games really take advantage of this option?

Yes.  As I understand it, the game doesn't need to be specially written to take advantage of it; the performance boosts happen in the DirectX/OpenGL implementation level.

Since the whole idea behind SLI is splitting work across two cards, with each card being responsible for a different part of the screen, you see the performance boost more in applications that do a lot of per-pixel processing (where each pixel or small region of the screen has a lot of work to be done on it that doesn't require looking at other stuff halfway across the screen).  Like Trippy said, AA and AF is one place you'll see a win.  Pixel shaders also benefit hugely.

Whether it's cost effective or not, I'm not sure.  The big benefit of SLI was supposedly to make it so that you could buy two bargain bin cards and hook them together to get the performance of one top of the line card that cost more than the two cheaper cards combined.  I think the technology is still too young for that to be a reality, since the 6800s are the first cards to really do it right and they haven't fallen very far in price yet.  It'll be interesting to see how things shape up once a 6800 is considered a bargain bin card, and more games are doing intense pixel shading stuff.

[eldaec]

SLI is not a gimmick, espeicially not with an LCD monitor that you will naturally want to keep in the native resolution as much as possible and where you want to be thowing in FSAA. But it is probably beyond the current 'sweet-spot' for cost/benefit, and there are a significant number of even new titles that object to SLI (though it's easy to turn off SLI  in those cases). I wouldn't bother with SLI unless you are at least going to buy 7800 GTs, preferably 7800 GTXs. One thing to consider is buying an SLI mobo, and a single 7800 GTX, then buying your second GTX in a year's time when it's price will have halved and a single 7800 GTX may no longer be able to run everything at 50 fps.

Dual cpu cores will not generally perform better in games than single cores at the same price point, though it is very possible that over the lifetime of the machine more software will take advantage of the dual core and reverse the position.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/21/the_mother_of_all_cpu_charts_2005/page29.html

Make sure you have an assload of RAM before you do either.

[Strazos]

Dual cpu cores will not generally perform better in games than single cores at the same price point, though it is very possible that over the lifetime of the machine more software will take advantage of the dual core and reverse the position.

A game may not neccessarily take explicit advantage of a dual-core setup, but while the game runs on one core, you can run other things in the background on the second core. It's supposed to be pretty awesome, especially for alt-tab whores.

[Signe]

When I do upgrade - gonna make sure I have more RAM than Signe.  * beats his chest *

Don't drag me into your jungle fantasies, Tarzan.

And yes, if you go the route you're thinking your penis will be marginally bigger than mine.  I don't mind.  It's a geek penis anyway and only slightly bigger than a clitoris.  Sooo... you'll have awesome computer kit and a big clitoris. 

Gratz! 

[Megrim]

When I do upgrade - gonna make sure I have more RAM than Signe.  * beats his chest *

Don't drag me into your jungle fantasies, Tarzan.

And yes, if you go the route you're thinking your penis will be marginally bigger than mine.  I don't mind.  It's a geek penis anyway and only slightly bigger than a clitoris.  Sooo... you'll have awesome computer kit and a big clitoris. 

Gratz! 

See, this post would have been allright, but at the exact moment i read it, Audrey Hepburn was singing the line "I could have spread my wings..." from My Fair Lady in the background.

[MrHat]

Hehe, clitoris.

[Lt.Dan]

It's not a gimmick if you like to run games at very high resolutions (1600 x 1200+) and with AA and AF cranked up.

One thing I've never understood - if you can run game at very high resolutions (1600 x 1200+) what noticeable visual improvement do you get from running anti-aliasing?

[Sky]

Well, all the benches and commentary I have heard lean toward it being a nice but expensive option. And they all tend to come to the conclusion I did: it's a great way to squeeze some extra life out of an aging pc. Drop that 7800 in now and then drop another matched card in a year and a half later.

Dual cpus....well, that's apparently inevitable.

[Jimbo]

I just built this summer a comp using:

ASUS EN6600/TD/128 Geforce 6600 128MB 128-bit DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail $106.00 x 2

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail $159.00

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ ClawHammer 1GHz FSB 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor - Retail $206.00

Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) System Memory - Retail  $175.50

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 36.7GB 10,000 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM $104.50

threw on 2 dvd burners, use the on board sound, and a modem, plus new keyboard and mouse and running it on an:

Acer AL1914 AB Black 19" 8ms LCD Monitor 250 cd/m2 500:1 0.294mm Pixel Pitch - Retail $249.99

on an aspire case with a ton of fans...it has been great.

Of course it was an upgrade from an 2600xp athlon that had a 4200ti card, that couldn't play many of the new games, but it has preformed flawlessly on BF2 (I'm allways one of the first to spawn), CoH, WoW or anything else I've thrown at it.  I would change things now and get the bigger hard drive from WD, at the time there 74GB were in the almost $400 range...now it is $155.  BTW, all the price ranges in May when I built this were considerably higher. 

I am surprised how much everything has dropped.  Built this one primarily for my son to use, and I was going to clunk around on my old machine till next year, but since we both like BF2, and my old machine blew up in a power failure (preach on brother sky...I have bought a back up system now), I'm probably going to have to work a ton of overtime and get a new one for me.  Sheesh...school, child, work, girlfriend...and trying to play games...

[Murgos]

The Radeon X800 GTO cards seem to big a really good deal right now:  http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/05/squeezing_value_out_of_lower_end_cards/

Very good benchmark numbers, lots of whizbang DX 9 features, 16 pipelines, for around $180 from places like newegg.  I'll probably drop the cash for one in the next week or two.

Next big expendature for me will be a BIG LCD Monitor (~ 27") to use as a monitor and TV and hook it up to a TV Tuner card (or if they make one good enough, response time, etc.. an LCD TV).  Whats native HD?  1920x1200?

[Jimbo]

Update*

Wow, was dinking around with Newegg, and I can build a pretty decent computer for under $2000 and that includes the monitor.  ASUS Mother board, 7800 GTX card, 3700 amd processor, 74 GB Raptor hard drive, 2 GB of Kingston ram, case, dvd burners...and all the other stuff.  Hmm...maybe the extra overtime will be worth it.  Then for christmas I'll get me a second card and upgrade my son's graphic cards too.   :-D

[Sky]

Dad!

[Samwise]

One thing I've never understood - if you can run game at very high resolutions (1600 x 1200+) what noticeable visual improvement do you get from running anti-aliasing?

Jaggies are still visible even at 1600x1200, especially on an LCD monitor, and especially when you have two objects with sharply contrasting colors on top of each other.  Antialiasing smooths out those remaining rough edges nicely.

I know this because when I was playing HL2 for the first time I felt the need to take screenshots at particularly scenic areas, and I noticed that some shots, the bridge in particular, just looked like crap without AA, even with the resolution maxed out.  If you have an object that's far enough away to be only a couple of pixels wide (like the girders in that bridge) and it's against a contrasting backdrop (like a light blue sky), the jaggies are very very noticeable.

[Nebu]

I was told by a couple of EE's that I work with that the dual SLI thing will, at best, give about a 20% improvement in performance over a single card.  A few of the earliest bench tests seemed to bear this out, but I haven't followed up. 

What does the peanut gallery have to say...

[Fabricated]

I was told by a couple of EE's that I work with that the dual SLI thing will, at best, give about a 20% improvement in performance over a single card.  A few of the earliest bench tests seemed to bear this out, but I haven't followed up. 

What does the peanut gallery have to say...

It depends really. I'm sure Call of Duty 2 and the other game out right now that has built-in optimizations for SLi can post better % increases, but overall it's not worth the extra money in my opinion.

[Samwise]

I was told by a couple of EE's that I work with that the dual SLI thing will, at best, give about a 20% improvement in performance over a single card.  A few of the earliest bench tests seemed to bear this out, but I haven't followed up. 

What does the peanut gallery have to say...

Completely depends on the application.  Depending on your benchmark you could literally see anywhere from 0% to 100% improvement.  Depends on how much work you're doing that can be done in parallel and how much needs to be handled by a single processor.  Render a single poly that covers the entire screen, with no shading effects?  0% improvement because one card or the other will have nothing useful to do.  Applying some hugely complex pixel shader effect across that polygon without adding anything else?  Close to 100% improvement because each card can do almost all the work for one half of the screen.  In the real world it's gonna fall somewhere in between.

nVIDIA's scheme gets a bit closer to the sweet spot than ATI's, IIRC, because ATI does an interlacing thing where one card takes the even lines and one card takes the odd lines, meaning that each card needs to know about each poly in the scene.  nVIDIA draws a line across the screen, with one card handling everything above the line and one card handling everything below, so some elements of the scene can be handled completely by one card without the other needing to know about it.  (The line is adjusted on the fly to balance the load, so if you're playing a flight sim and most of the complexity is in the bottom third of the screen, the line is much lower.)

[Nebu]

Thanks for the info guys.  I may do a little reading about them this afternoon and will pass along what I find.  I need a distraction from work!

[Strazos]

...

Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) System Memory - Retail  $175.50

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 36.7GB 10,000 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM $104.50
...

1) With a 1GHZ FSB, why in the hell  would you hamstring yourself with comparatively slow PC3200 Ram?

2) Why such a small HDD? Are you also reusing large drives that you did not buy recently? Hell, my XP partition is almost 11GB by itself, and I have almost nothing besides the OS installed within it. Sure SCSI is fast, but they're small as hell. I have more than 200GB of storage capacity, and even that does not seem to be enough - and I'm not even a music whore like others here surely are.

Just boggles the mind, though I'm sure it still runs great. I am an expert at everything so make sure you do exactly what I say.

[Trippy]

I was told by a couple of EE's that I work with that the dual SLI thing will, at best, give about a 20% improvement in performance over a single card.  A few of the earliest bench tests seemed to bear this out, but I haven't followed up. 

What does the peanut gallery have to say...

Your EE coworkers are wrong. Check out the links in my above reply.

[Nebu]

I was told by a couple of EE's that I work with that the dual SLI thing will, at best, give about a 20% improvement in performance over a single card.  A few of the earliest bench tests seemed to bear this out, but I haven't followed up. 

What does the peanut gallery have to say...

Your EE coworkers are wrong. Check out the links in my above reply.

The results seem very software dependant.  I think that on average, they would be correct but incorrect for specific circumstances.  Also, that statement is several months old... before we had all of that nice data from dedicated testers.  I should have clarified that.

[Trippy]

Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) System Memory - Retail  $175.50

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 36.7GB 10,000 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM $104.50

1) With a 1GHZ FSB, why in the hell  would you hamstring yourself with comparatively slow PC3200 Ram?

If you are assuming the memory bus is running at 1 GHz what RAM would you suggest? PC16000? Actually you are getting the HyperTransport bus speed and the memory bus speed, which are separate buses on the Athlon 64, confused. The memory bus runs at 200 MHz which with DDR memory means you want DDR400 RAM which is the same as PC3200, unless you plan on overclocking your FSB in which case you might want to get RAM with tested higher max bandwidth.

[Samwise]

I was told by a couple of EE's that I work with that the dual SLI thing will, at best, give about a 20% improvement in performance over a single card.

Your EE coworkers are wrong. Check out the links in my above reply.

The results seem very software dependant.  I think that on average, they would be correct but incorrect for specific circumstances.  Also, that statement is several months old... before we had all of that nice data from dedicated testers.  I should have clarified that.

If they said 20% "at best" and there any any specific circumstances at all that do better than 20%, they're 100% incorrect. 

(Sorry, I get nitpicky when people start throwing real numbers around - I acknowledge that this is a character flaw but I have no plans to correct it.)

[Nebu]

If they said 20% "at best" and there any any specific circumstances at all that do better than 20%, they're 100% incorrect. 

(Sorry, I get nitpicky when people start throwing real numbers around - I acknowledge that this is a character flaw but I have no plans to correct it.)

Quite alright.  I see your point.

On a more simplified note, I look at is one more of diminishing returns. Some people find the extra expense worthwhile, while others will never really get enough benefit to justify the added cost.  I think that qualified people will know if dual card systems will do what they need. The rest are Alienware consumers with cash they either burn in an ashtray or spend on a system they can show-off to the neighbors.   

I am surprised by some of the tests and imagine that as more software is developed that utilizes this tech that more people will adopt dual card systems.  Then again, that's pretty much just a common sense response.

[MrHat]

Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) System Memory - Retail  $175.50

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 36.7GB 10,000 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM $104.50

1) With a 1GHZ FSB, why in the hell  would you hamstring yourself with comparatively slow PC3200 Ram?

If you are assuming the memory bus is running at 1 GHz what RAM would you suggest? PC16000? Actually you are getting the HyperTransport bus speed and the memory bus speed, which are separate buses on the Athlon 64, confused. The memory bus runs at 200 MHz which with DDR memory means you want DDR400 RAM which is the same as PC3200, unless you plan on overclocking your FSB in which case you might want to get RAM with tested higher max bandwidth.

Where would you find the memory bus speeds listed for this kind of info?  What exactly does something like 2-2-2-5 mean?  What does dual channel do for you?

[Fabricated]

...

Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) System Memory - Retail  $175.50

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 36.7GB 10,000 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM $104.50
...

1) With a 1GHZ FSB, why in the hell  would you hamstring yourself with comparatively slow PC3200 Ram?

2) Why such a small HDD? Are you also reusing large drives that you did not buy recently? Hell, my XP partition is almost 11GB by itself, and I have almost nothing besides the OS installed within it. Sure SCSI is fast, but they're small as hell. I have more than 200GB of storage capacity, and even that does not seem to be enough - and I'm not even a music whore like others here surely are.

Just boggles the mind, though I'm sure it still runs great. I am an expert at everything so make sure you do exactly what I say.

If you mean the timings, I doubt he'd really notice the difference. The price isn't too hot for Kingston Value RAM though. You could get some from Mushkin with better timings for less.

As for the HD, I agree. Just get a decent 100+ SATA drive and be done with it. Some have read/write times nearly on par with the ol' Raptor.

[Strazos]

If you are assuming the memory bus is running at 1 GHz what RAM would you suggest? PC16000? Actually you are getting the HyperTransport bus speed and the memory bus speed, which are separate buses on the Athlon 64, confused. The memory bus runs at 200 MHz which with DDR memory means you want DDR400 RAM which is the same as PC3200, unless you plan on overclocking your FSB in which case you might want to get RAM with tested higher max bandwidth.

Well, he did quote a 1ghz FSB speed, so I am assuming that's what he would be running at (at max). To handle 1hgz FSB speeds, pick up something like this. I don't mean the timings...though I did not know about the seperare speeds on Athlon 64, as I'm still running an XP 2700+.

Hmmm....

[Trippy]

If you are assuming the memory bus is running at 1 GHz what RAM would you suggest? PC16000? Actually you are getting the HyperTransport bus speed and the memory bus speed, which are separate buses on the Athlon 64, confused. The memory bus runs at 200 MHz which with DDR memory means you want DDR400 RAM which is the same as PC3200, unless you plan on overclocking your FSB in which case you might want to get RAM with tested higher max bandwidth.

Well, he did quote a 1ghz FSB speed, so I am assuming that's what he would be running at (at max). To handle 1hgz FSB speeds, pick up something like this. I don't mean the timings...though I did not know about the seperare speeds on Athlon 64, as I'm still running an XP 2700+.

Hmmm....

The FSB on an Athlon 64 runs at 200 MHz. If the FSB was really running at 1 GHz that would imply a DDR2000 spec RAM (200 FSB = 200 x 2 (for double data rate) = DDR400 = PC3200) or PC16000 as I joked above. Also, the Athlon 64 doesn't use DDR2 memory (yet). HyperTransport on a Socket 939 motherboard is running at 2 GHz which is where some of the confusion may lie.

[Strazos]

All I know is that my mobo's FSB runs at 333mhz. I am happy.


Also, don't some higher-end Pentium systems have a FSB speed of 800mhz?

[Trippy]

All I know is that my mobo's FSB runs at 333mhz. I am happy.

Also, don't some higher-end Pentium systems have a FSB speed of 800mhz?

Pentium 4s typically run at 800 MHz or 1066 MHz FSB but the Intel FSB is not the same as the Athlon 64's since on the Pentium 4 all I/O between the CPU and other components has to go over the FSB while the Athlon 64 has a separate bus and on-chip memory controller for memory access and it uses the HyperTransport bus for everything else.

[Trippy]

Okay I see where this 1 GHz number is coming from -- it's a reference to the HyperTransport speed which in the newer AMD documentation is spec'd at 2 GHz for the Socket 939 HT though some older documentation specs it at "1 GHz (2000 MT/s)" so there's probably some sort of clock doubling or "double pumping" going on analogous to Intel's 800 MHz FSB which really has a base clock speed of 200 MHz (or 266 for the 1066 version) but is "quad pumped".

[MrHat]

Okay I see where this 1 GHz number is coming from -- it's a reference to the HyperTransport speed which in the newer AMD documentation is spec'd at 2 GHz for the Socket 939 HT though some older documentation specs it at "1 GHz (2000 MT/s)" so there's probably some sort of clock doubling or "double pumping" going on analogous to Intel's 800 MHz FSB which really has a base clock speed of 200 MHz (or 266 for the 1066 version) but is "quad pumped".

I'm so confused.

[Strazos]

In short:

It's good stuff.