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nVidia worked 2.5 years on SLI drivers |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 12 October 2004 |
Even if ATI goes for SLI marchitecture apart of hardware it has to tune its software to support this relatively complex concept, pardon not concept marchitecture.
 nVidia worked 2.5 years on SLI drivers
We spoke with an nVidia senior software chap and he told us a few days back that nVidia has played with SLI driver development for the past two and a half years.
If we did the sums right that means that nVidia decided to followed up with SLI almost immediately after acquiring 3Dfx back in December 2000. Well, it did take some months off this Voodoo legacy but returned surprisingly fast to the idea.
This means that there are lot of software engineering hours invested into this development and that such a complex thing simply takes much time and planning.
nVidia is still proud of its SLI stuff and we will all see some numbers after nForce 4 SLI introduction that is scheduled after the nForce 4 Ultra/plain introduction.
Let's wait and see how those drivers will turn out. Oh yes I was told that 65 drivers with support for SLI cards will get an WHQL certificate. If you are using two cards and SLI mode it's twice as hard to get that stamp of approval but nVidia is sure that it can get it.
A lot of eyes in Canada are looking to see what is going to happen with SLI and if it performs well it simply has to make a response. ATI SLI? It's not that much unlikely and they can always ask their friends at Alienware to help them with their Video Array marchitecture.
Still drivers are the nasty part, oh boy yes, and ATI still remembers ATI Maxx cards and that driver debacle. Another angle of that story is recently very good Catalyst drivers that get WHQL every single month.
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