Quad SLI with 9800 GX2: Pushing a System to its Limit
by Derek Wilson on March 25, 2008 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
(Not so) Final Words
Unfortunately, we can’t really draw a fair final conclusion from the data we have here. Certainly this is an expensive solution, and it is absolutely not for everyone. But does it fill the needs of those who would want it and could afford it? Maybe and maybe not.
In almost every game other than Crysis, we don’t have a need to move beyond one 9800 GX2 (or 8800 GT/GTS/GTX/Ultra SLI). And in Crysis, we aren’t simply going to trust NVIDIA when they say we should see 60% scaling. We need to actually make it happen ourselves. The fact that we’ve run into some pretty strange problems doesn’t bode well for the solution in general, but we are willing to see what we can do to make it perform near to what we expect before we cast final judgment.
At the same time, that final judgment must include all the facts about what you gain from Quad SLI for the money. If it makes Crysis smooth as butter at Very High settings (it is actually playable even with the 40 average FPS system limitation), then that is something. But $1200 for a Crysis accelerator is a bit of overkill. NVIDIA has made the point to me that $1200 spent on graphics cards is better placed than $1200 spent on an Extreme Edition CPU. That isn’t a particularly compelling argument for us as I don’t believe we have ever recommended the purchase of an Extreme Edition processor (except for overclocking enthusiasts, perhaps). You certainly don’t get what you pay for unless you really need it for a specific CPU heavy workload. Content creation, engineering, math, and workstation applications might be a good fit, but certainly not gaming and especially not in a world where the more extreme you get the more cores you have.
Which brings me to a side rant. Parallelism is a good thing, but neither Intel nor AMD can ignore the single-threaded code path. Not everything can be split up easily, and every thread will always be limited in performance by the speed of the core it is running on. Of course, specialized cores on a heterogeneous processor would help, as would dedicated hardware. That just makes us lament the death of the PPU through the NVIDIA acquisition even more. But I digress.
On the topic of 9800 GX2 Quad SLI, there are benefits aside from the potential of Crysis that we haven’t covered here. NVIDIA has enabled AA on S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but it is very processing and memory heavy. Quad SLI could enable playable frame rates at higher resolutions with 2xAA enabled. With Clear Sky coming out soon, this could be a good thing for fans. You also get SLI AA modes. These do offer a benefit, but AA has diminishing returns at higher resolutions, and especially at higher AA levels. We will be testing SLI AA again at some point, but we want to look at both image quality and performance when we do so.
These cards also act as incredible space heaters. That may not be important right now with summer coming on, but any of our readers that live at the North Pole (Hi Santa! I've been good!) or in Antarctica (sentient penguins running Linux, for example) might appreciate the ability to turn down the thermostat while they sit next to their toasty Quad SLI system.
The bottom line right now is that this is not a solution for most people. Unless we see great scaling in Crysis, there are only a few other compelling features that can currently be enabled through the use of Quad SLI. Sure, it might handle future games with ease, but we always advise against trying to future proof when it comes to graphics. That’s always a path that leads to heartache and the hemorrhaging of money. Just ask previous 7950 GX2 Quad SLI owners about how happy they've been with support and performance over the past year. If you aren’t obsessed with Crysis, skip it. If you are obsessed with Crysis, we’ll get back to you with some numbers on what performance is like once we find a system we can get some headroom on: I’ll have 790i this week and I’ll be hard at work testing it out.
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strikeback03 - Wednesday, March 26, 2008 - link
you posted your comment 20 hrs ago. I don't see any comments posted by any Anandtech staff in this review since that time, so no guarantee they have actually read your comment.gudodayn - Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - link
< Layzer253 ~ No, they shouldnt. It works just fine >Given that 9800x2 is a power card, more powerful than 3870x2 that 9800x2 will run into CPU limitations..........
Then in theory, when using the same platform (same CPU, RAM, etc.), shouldn't 9800x2 score at least within the ball park range of the 3870x2??
It would just mean with a faster CPU, 9800x2 will have lots of room for improvement whereas the 3870x2 wouldn't!!
But that's not what's happening here though, is it??
For some reason, 3870x2 in Crossfire is scaling a lot better than 9800x2 in SLI ~ in a lot of the tests!!
Either SLI drivers are messed up or 9800x2 cant run quad GPUs effectively.........
LemonJoose - Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - link
I honestly don't know why the hardware vendors keep trying to push these high end solution that aren't stable and don't work the way they are supposed to. Exactly who is the market for $500 motherboards that require expensive RAM designed for servers, $1000 CPUs that will be outperfromed by mainstream CPUs in a year or less, and $600 video cards that have stability issues and driver problems even when not run in SLI mode.I would really love it Anandtech and other hardware sites would come out and give these products the 1 out of 10 or 2 out of 10 review scores that they deserve, and tell the hardware companies to spend more time developing solutions for real entusiasts with mainstream pocketbooks, instead of wasting their engineering resources on these high end solutions that nobody wants.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, March 26, 2008 - link
Dunno if anyone has actually bought Skulltrail, but obviously people do buy $1000 CPUs and $500 video cards, as some GX2 owners have already posted in this thread, and some people previously bought the Ultra even when it was well over $500. Not something I would do, but there are obviously those with the time and money to play with this kind of thing.B3an - Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - link
To the writer of this article, or anyone else... i have this strange problem with the GX2.In the article you're getting 60+ FPS @ 2560x1200 res with 4xAA. Now if i do this i get nowhere near that frame rate. Without AA it's perfect, but with AA it completely kills it at that res.
At first i was thinking that the 512MB usable VRAM was not enough for 2560x1600 + AA so i get a slide slow with 4xAA at that res. But from these tests, you're not getting that.
What backed up my theory for this is that with games with higher res/bigger textures, even 2xAA would kill frame rates. I'd go from 60+ FPS to literally single digit FPS just by turning on 2xAA @ 2560x1200. But with older games with lower res textures i can turn the AA up a lot higher before this happens.
Does anyone know what the problem could be? Because i'd really like to run games at 2560x1600 with AA, but cannot at the moment.
I'm on Vista SP1, with 4GB RAM, and a Quad @ 3.5GHz.
I've also tried 3 different sets of drivers.
nubie - Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - link
OK, it is about time that Socketable GPU's are on the market, how about a mATX board with a edge connected PCIe x32 slot? Make the video board ATX compliant (IE video board + mATX board = ATX compliant).Then we can finally cool these damn video cards, and maybe find a way of getting them power that doesn't get in the way.
You purchase the proper daughterboard for your class (main-stream, enthusiast, overclocker/benchmarker), and it will come with the ram slots(or onboard ram) and proper voltage circuitry. Then you can change just the GPU when you need to upgrade.
I know it would be hard to implement and confusing, but it would be less confusing than the current situation once we got used to it, and it would be a hell of a lot more sane.
You could use a PCI-e extender to connect it to existing PCI-e mATX or full ATX motherboards.
It is either this, or put the GPU socket on the damn motherboard already, it is 2008, it needs to happen. (If the videocard was connected over Hypertransport III you wouldn't have any problem with bandwidth). The next step really needs to be a general-purpose processor built into the video card, that way you aren't cpu/system bound like the current ridiculous setup (The 790i chipset seems to be helping with the ability to have the northbridge do batch commands across the GPU's, but minimum we need to see some Physics moving away from the CPU, general physics haven't changed since the universe started, why waste a general purpose CPU on them?)
nubie - Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - link
Just to re-iterate, why am I buying a new card every time when they just seem to be recycling the reference design? All GPU systems need the same as a motherboard, Clean voltage to the main processor and its memory, as well as a bus for the RAM and some I/O. The 7900 8800 and 9600 are practically the same boards with the same memory bus, can't we have it socketed?tkrushing - Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - link
I am all for SLI/Crossfire or whatever you can afford to do but why are we starting to lose focus on single card solution users? I'm sure if I really wanted to sacrafice I could save up for a multiple GPU system but a single g92 for less than half the price for a relatively small performance hit in crysis. And yes I love it but I'm saying it, I just think Crysis is a poorly optimized game to some degree. Give use new and not reused single card solutions! (9 series)tviceman - Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - link
I have been thinking the same thing lately, but last week after reading about Intel's plans to use one of it's cores in CPU's as a graphics unit, I started thinking about the ramifications of this. I am willing to bet that Nvidia is trying to develop a hybrid CPU/GPU to compete on the same platform that Intel and AMD will eventually have. If this is true, that it's probably a reasonable explanation as to why there has been a severe lack of all new GPU's since the launch of the 8xxx series a year ago.dlasher - Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - link
page 1, paragraph 2, line 1:Is:
"...it’s not for the feint of heart.."
Should be:
"...it’s not for the faint of heart.."