January 24, 2005

Nvidia SLI Marketing Hype - Needs Specific Drivers to Work

Graphics card companies have been known to over-hype the capabilities of their products over the years. Both ATI and Nvidia are culprits. It turns out that SLI, where users can hook up two Nvidia graphics cards for theoretically double the performance, only works if Nvidia develops a specific driver for the game. That is worrisome as many games are currently unsupported and no-one knows how quickly new games will get driver support. What's the point in paying thousands of dollars on an SLI system, if the games don't get the performance boost out of the box?

Out of the twelve games we tested, we know that seven do not support SLI. We know this because SLI gave us no benefits in the benchmarks or real-world gaming whatsoever. That is, there was no difference between single card performance and SLI performance. Interestingly enough, when turning on NVIDIA’s built in HUD SLI Load meter, it was no where to be seen in our games listed above as having no SLI support or benefit. [Discuss]