DennisHolland Posted February 27, 2005 Share Posted February 27, 2005 Hi all, I had some advice from a collegue in Italy yesterday about how to increase the overall quality of working in this business, he mentioned the new SLI technology by Nvidia...or is it allready yesterday's news? Anyway, take a look: http://www.nvidia.com/page/sli.html Enjoy, Dennis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted February 27, 2005 Share Posted February 27, 2005 i have not talked to anyone who has tested one out yet. i am curious how well it works with in a cad style 3d environment. ...i assume it was developed with a gamer in mind, and not necessarily a illustrator. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted February 28, 2005 Share Posted February 28, 2005 I think it's been out for a while now, Nvidia have release a commercial renderer of its own that utilise the graphic card GPU. It's called NVIDIA® GelatoTM 1.1 GPU-Accelerated Final-Frame Renderer. By using SLI mode I think it will definitely boots your rendering speed by having 2 nvidia card running in parallel. http://film.nvidia.com/page/gelato.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted February 28, 2005 Share Posted February 28, 2005 the SLI instructions were probably released awhile ago, but the actual motherboards with with SLI just started hitting the market in late December and January. it is part of nVidia's nforce4 chipsets. there are 3 levels of chipset you can get. ___ (not sure of the name) or Pro or SLI. each one steps up slightly, similar to their video cards. the SLI is the only one in the series that has the instructions for 2 video cards. i guess early version of the Pro series could be fooled into running 2 motherboards if using the nVidia SLI drivers, but i guess nVidia was quick to remedy that problem. ....but remember. 2 video cards will do nothing for your rendering speeds, but the nForce4 chipset could definitely, and probably does, improve your rendering time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted February 28, 2005 Share Posted February 28, 2005 Originally from Crazy Homeless Guy ....but remember. 2 video cards will do nothing for your rendering speeds, You sure about this Crazy Homeless Guy? I thought that hardware accelerated renderer would support SLI mode since it's coming from Nvidia and its one of their trump card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted February 28, 2005 Share Posted February 28, 2005 Originally from Crazy Homeless Guy You sure about this Crazy Homeless Guy? I thought that hardware accelerated renderer would support SLI mode since it's coming from Nvidia and its one of their trump card. maybe. not sure. i was going by the age old adage that video cards were for displayin' and ram, cpu, and chipset were for renderin'. so 2 video cards would make the displayin' go really fast and smooth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
severegwar Posted February 28, 2005 Share Posted February 28, 2005 SLI best support is now from the last ASUS MB, equipped with the last Nvidia Nforce4 and with some fast features in the PCI-X bus. I just ask a friend that use SLI and he assure me that boost poligon calculation over the machine limits, and considering that u can use Quadro advantage i think that a SLI machine can do fast and reliable renderings with your applications. Bye to all Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted February 28, 2005 Share Posted February 28, 2005 SLI best support is now from the last ASUS MB, equipped with the last Nvidia Nforce4 and with some fast features in the PCI-X bus. I just ask a friend that use SLI and he assure me that boost poligon calculation over the machine limits, and considering that u can use Quadro advantage i think that a SLI machine can do fast and reliable renderings with your applications. Bye to all ...but still. is the SLI improving your rendering, or is the nForce4 chipset improving your rendering time? graphics cards typically have nothing to due with how your image is rendered unless you are rendering using openGL or DirectX. when you view a wire frame model, or play a game, you are probably using one of those rendering methods to view the model or scene. when you actually render an image, your video card does very very little for you beyond displaying the image on your monitor. the actuall rendering is computed with the CPU, the motherboard, and the RAM. nForce is a chipset, a chipset gives nstructions to the motherboard on how to use its resources. now as rob suggested, since nVidia is making the chipset, they might have a special feature that utilizes the graphics card in some process that it was not utilized in before. this part i am not sure on. but to just say that you rendering will be faster because you are using 2 graphics card is not true in the typical case. you will be able to move and navigate around your model faster, and display more polygons, but if you are rendering an image that will produce a set of pixels, and not vectors, i don't think SLI helps you n this manner. like i said, i could be wrong, but i am basing my statements on how computers work in general. the nForce chipset could be doing something different, but i am nto aware of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DennisHolland Posted March 1, 2005 Author Share Posted March 1, 2005 Alienware came up with this, it maybe explains the working of the SLI a bit... Aurora 7500 sli Also some usefull links to new content at the Nvidia site... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
severegwar Posted March 2, 2005 Share Posted March 2, 2005 You are in the right but sli tecnology can really push the real performance, when you are calculating poligons about pixel and 2d me too i'm not sure but i was talking about rendering poligons in shene. The new HP workstation is SLI capable too for example so maybe we was talking about 2 different things or i bad describe what i was thinking about. Anyway really tenks to hae clarify my words. Ciao Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
animart Posted March 2, 2005 Share Posted March 2, 2005 sli is only to work 2 graphic card like one the gelato software to render whit this card is independent of sli Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
luckytohaveher Posted March 21, 2005 Share Posted March 21, 2005 ...when you actually render an image, your video card does very very little for you beyond displaying the image on your monitor. the actual rendering is computed with the CPU, the motherboard, and the RAM. You are correct in almost every case except with RenderDrive technology and Gelato. Normally the rendering process is CPU/RAM/MB based as you have referenced. With the NVIDIA GPU solution and when using ONLY the GELATO renderer software you will be able to take advantage of the GPUs/Video cards. This is similar in some ways to the RENDERDRIVE/PURE Card technology. If you want to go the GPU route you will be rendering outside the CPU most of the time. Also there maybe compatibility issues with plugins and other technical requirements. You would be able to run another plugin render, the scanline standard, or the Gelato. Unfortunately you can only use one at a time -- no mixing. That being said, I saw an example at SIGGRAPH last year and it appeared to be very fast. If it gives 400% of the speed of a standard CPU based system, then it has a great deal of value because you would be displacing other costs in horsepower. PURE cards are around $3K. An additional rendering system would put you back about $2K or more. A card costs around $700. The only other note would be network rendering. If you wanted to do that, all of the systems would need NVIDIA cards of the appropriate class and the gelato software which, I think, has a licensing fee per node or station. Check with NVIDIA. I am waiting to see what someone has done with it. I know NVIDIA is trying to create a film quality renderer. It should be interesting to see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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