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Digital_Trans
10-14-06, 01:28 PM
Will Windows Vista see 1GB/2GB of Video ram on NVIDIA Quad SLI or will it only see 512MB like it's predecessor Windows XP? Or would this totally rely on NVIDIA to revise their nForce chipset and SLI layout?
|MaguS|
10-14-06, 02:10 PM
Will Windows Vista see 1GB/2GB of Video ram on NVIDIA Quad SLI or will it only see 512MB like it's predecessor Windows XP? Or would this totally rely on NVIDIA to revise their nForce chipset and SLI layout?

You don't have 1GB of videoram due to the way SLi works. QuadSLi is only 4x512MB boards... RAM doesn't get added up, its only 512MB. Like I have 2 7800GTX 256MB, I don't have 512MB RAM only 256MB.
jAkUp
10-14-06, 11:21 PM
Each GPU needs to fill the framebuffer, its just the way SLI works, so no, you will never see double the ram size in SLI's current form.
jolle
10-15-06, 07:28 AM
Yeah both boards needs the same sets of data in their respective RAMs.
Only way I can see that could be avoided would be if both GPUs could address both the boards RAM shared, but then you would need to connect everything up with a bus that is equally fast as the bus between GPU and RAM, across the boards..
Or something like that, and that isn't likely to happen any time soon Id guess.
So irregardless of OS, both cards need the same set of data on board, hence 2x512mb will still effectively work as 512mb total.
jAkUp
10-15-06, 11:07 AM
Yeah both boards needs the same sets of data in their respective RAMs.
Only way I can see that could be avoided would be if both GPUs could address both the boards RAM shared, but then you would need to connect everything up with a bus that is equally fast as the bus between GPU and RAM, across the boards..
Or something like that, and that isn't likely to happen any time soon Id guess.
So irregardless of OS, both cards need the same set of data on board, hence 2x512mb will still effectively work as 512mb total.

Yup, in order to double the ram, the cards would need to share this data through the PCIe bus, or over the SLI bridge, thats a huge amount of data that would need to be transfeered back and forth, definetely not gonna happen.