R700 Inter-GPU Connection Discussion

If there were a market for it (which there isn't, winning the benchmarks with AFR is good enough to sell these cards) they could build a part which could sort the tri's and pass them to the other chip(s) if it covered their tiles.
 
Lukfi said:
=>Kaotik: That shouldn't happen. If I'm not mistaken, CrossFire SFR uses a fixed ratio for each game - but it's not always 50:50 'cause it's a known problem that there's more work in the lower part of the screen. And AFAIK, SLI continually shifts the ratio so the workloads are balanced better, so this should be possible with CF as well, but probably has more (CPU?) overhead.
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A better solution would be to have one card start at the top and one at the bottom and work your way to the middle.
 
I remember that someone in the pre-DX10-era had some kind of solution to this - Realizm 800. But having some sort of HW doing very specialized jobs (and only those!) is what all evolution of the APIs is trying to get rid of, right?
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You're right, MfA, the market would have been small some month ago, but since then more and more reviewers have started to notice the problems with special profiles, input lag and microstuttering. Reminds me of the days, when people started to watch out not only for fast Fps but for beautiful pixels too.
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I do hope though, Kaotik, that there's either some kind of alternativ to AFR, which is also scalable over multiple GPUs as well as transparent to applications and itself not reliant on profiles. I was and still am trying to get a better understanding, why certain ideas for multi-gpu-rendering which were valid before are just ignored nowadays.

Sure, i recognize the need for longer bars - maybe it's time for another revolution. ;)
 
CarstenS said:
I do hope though, Kaotik, that there's either some kind of alternativ to AFR, which is also scalable over multiple GPUs as well as transparent to applications and itself not reliant on profiles. I was and still am trying to get a better understanding, why certain ideas for multi-gpu-rendering which were valid before are just ignored nowadays.
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Well, the only radically different from what we have today would be 3dfx's ScanLine Interleaving I guess, but it was possible only due the fact that the cards didn't need to think about geometry, it was done by CPU already (AFAIK anyway)
 
Ideally, you'd have developer support on this and then you could achieve high efficiency split-frame rendering. Games already do a lot of rough culling to get rid of stuff that's not on screen, if the developer set up 2 viewports (each representing half of the screen) and independently culled stuff for each viewport before sending one viewport to each video card, it would be possible to achieve very high efficiency.

Of course, that defeats the purpose of Crossfire/SLI, which is that you should be able to just drop in another card and it would "just work".
 
That guy posting the microstuttering reports says he didn't see a %15 improvement over regular 4870 CF, but 2 more people who own the 4870x2 do maintain it's indeed %15 faster than 4870CF. No one reveals the clock speeds, though.
 
annihilator said:
That guy posting the microstuttering reports says he didn't see a %15 improvement over regular 4870 CF, but 2 more people who own the 4870x2 do maintain it's indeed %15 faster than 4870CF. No one reveals the clock speeds, though.
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Maybe he's not using the "right" drivers.
 
willardjuice said:
That's what I thought, but I'm wondering if there are newer drivers? Either way, thanks for the good work Sampsa.
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Actually there was new driver released before weekend. I already ran all my tests again for the preview I'm working on. I would say this card is performing very good but it produces quite a lot heat and power consumption is high.
 
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