Nvidia and Intel?

[PaulTa]

Does anyone think that AMD and ATI forming up means that Intel might start supporting SLI? I hear that just about any Intel board can do it with a BIOS revision.

Thoughts?

[madmat]

Any Intel board can do it with a modification to the videocard drivers but nVidia as of yet refuses to implement an Intel chipset in their drivers. On older drivers from the first SLI configs back in the 6XXX days Intel chipsets would do SLI until nVidia figured this out and blocked it.

Sadly those old drivers only support 6XXX cards and have very spotty SLI compatibility with games so it's useless. A while back there was some foreign site that had been doing SLI hacking with the nV drivers and getting some very amazing 3DMark scores. nVidia caught wind of this and threatened some sort of action against them and put a halt to their fun.

nVidia sucks as far as their interaction with the tweaker crowd, I never heard of Intel doing anything like that with people making software to tweak their boards to run OC'ed but hack anything for nVidia cards and they get all pissy about it. Yes, I know that they're hacking an nVidia written driver but I'd be willing to bet that if you wrote your own drivers that enabled SLI with Crossfire chipsets or Intel chipsets they'd come after you just as hard once they caught wind of it.

[DvBoard]

Seems strange the nVidia would do such a thing. I mean if i can't get SLI i buy ATi. They lose more than they could possibly gain.

[madmat]

If you're looking to sell chipsets and want to play on the true fanboism this is the route you take. Actually I'm surprised that Intel still supports Crossfire and that ATI allows such support with the acquisition of ATI by AMD.

[Kab]

Does anyone think that AMD and ATI forming up means that Intel might start supporting SLI? I hear that just about any Intel board can do it with a BIOS revision.

Thoughts?
Yes some mobos allow BIOS mods to enable this feature, but it may still throw out many problems due to no official support. It only needs drivers adequately developed. :mad:

There are guys in Asia, Delhi the last time I saw it who are running their own drivers and getting SLI. They don't speak our native language though.. :(

[jonnyGURU]

May?

I've yet to get a system to work properly with two Nvidia cards in an Intel chipset in SLI. I was so happy when 680i came out.

I've talked to the guys at Intel and they say that the ball is in Nvidia's court. As Matt points out, Nvidia wants to sell GPU's AND chipsets. They don't let anyone use the instruction sets that make SLI work in a chipset.

Fortunately for Nvidia, Intel still sees the SLI gaming market as a "niche," so I don't think they feel they're missing out on anything by not having an Intel chipset with native SLI support.

[Spectre]

If you're looking to sell chipsets and want to play on the true fanboism this is the route you take. Actually I'm surprised that Intel still supports Crossfire and that ATI allows such support with the acquisition of ATI by AMD.

I don't think ATI/AMD would neccesarily block support...hell if they can't sell the CPU might as well make some money off the GPU.

[DvBoard]

May?

I've yet to get a system to work properly with two Nvidia cards in an Intel chipset in SLI. I was so happy when 680i came out.

I've talked to the guys at Intel and they say that the ball is in Nvidia's court. As Matt points out, Nvidia wants to sell GPU's AND chipsets. They don't let anyone use the instruction sets that make SLI work in a chipset.

Fortunately for Nvidia, Intel still sees the SLI gaming market as a "niche," so I don't think they feel they're missing out on anything by not having an Intel chipset with native SLI support.

What's the money maker though, chipsets or graphic cards? To not sell 2 graphic cards because someone won't buy thier chipset seems to lose alot more than just not getting the chipset sale.

Not to mention if the nVidia chipset is better, people will go with that anyways.

[jonnyGURU]

The money maker is BOTH.

They know that. For every one sale they lose to ATI because an ATI card doesn't work on an Intel chipset, they've sold several hundred Nvidia chipsets and video cards.

The typical ATI buyer is someone that is going to buy ATI because they want ATI. Not because they want an Intel chipset.