| What is Nvidia SLI? |
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| June 2011 | |
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NVIDIA SLI technology is a revolutionary platform innovation that
allows you to intelligently scale graphics performance by combining
multiple NVIDIA graphics solutions in an SLI-Certified motherboard.
Using proprietary software algorithms and dedicated scalability logic in
each NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU), NVIDIA SLI technology
delivers up to twice the performance (with 2 cards) and 2.8X the
performance (with 3 cards) compared to a single graphics solution. How Does SLI Work? NVIDIA SLI basically works like a dual core processor, it splits the load into two. With SLI you have two or more video cards connected together in a master/slave setup via what's called an SLI bridge. When displaying 3D graphics on the screen, all the work is divided into smaller parts and sent to each of the GPUs for faster processing. When the slave GPU is done processing, it sends its output to the master GPU via the SLI bridge, and the master GPU combines everything to display the images to the monitor.
To use NVIDIA SLI in your gaming computer you must have a motherboard based on a NVIDIA chipset and you need at least two PCI-Express 16x slots. You also need two (or more) NVIDIA video cards that are SLI compatible. You must keep in mind that the two or more video cards must have the same GPU (and preferably have the same memory and clock speed too), although they may be of different manufacturers. •“Two Cards are Better than One”• Scalable Link Interface – scale graphics performance by combining multiple cards E.g. 2 x VGA cards working together to provide up to twice the performance for supported applications • Quad SLI – 2 x GTX 590, 4x GPUs, 2048 cores, 6GB Return to Nvidia SLI page |