NVIDIA Debuts SLI Super Graphics

By David Em

July 18, 2005

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Graphics cards double in power roughly every six months, handily outstripping Moore's Law. Fresh product revs trigger price drops in the models they replace, with the result that virtually every computer sold today has a graphics engine under its hood of the sort found only on highly specialized supercomputers a decade ago.

This level of imaging horsepower is overkill not only for the spreadsheet and word processing crowd, but for image makers such as photographers and illustrators as well. But certain realtime 3D applications, such as scientific visualization, geological modeling, and games that rely on highly detailed geometry and textures, are still nowhere near their saturation points in terms of processing power.

NVIDIA has taken the latest big step forward in 3D hardware performance with its Scalable Link Interface, aka SLI, a technology that harnesses the power of two graphics cards to create a single Uber-Card.

Background

A few years ago there were nearly a dozen graphics card makers, but now there are effectively only three: NVIDIA, ATI, and 3Dlabs. ATI and NVIDIA dominate the mass market, but all three are contenders in the ultra-high performance sweepstakes. The leader in the race changes from season to season.

The economic incentives for staying a step or two ahead of the rest of the pack are huge. High end 3D workstations are a rarefied niche market, but the makers of mass market desktops, portables, and game systems are quick to incorporate workstation-class features into their products as soon as they become available.

Hardcore gamers will remember a previous incarnation of SLI developed by 3dfx in the late nineties for its Voodoo 2 card, called Scan Line Interleaving. Scan Line Interleaving worked by using two cards to calculate alternate odd and even scan lines in an image and merge them into the final displayed result. NVIDIA came into possession of this technology when it acquired 3dfx.

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