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Loading ...Why Hybrid SLI will be rubbish
Clive Webster
Nvidia has just announced a new kind of SLI: Hybrid SLI. This doesn’t pair a GeForce 8800 GTS with a Radeon HD 3870 or anything like that. The ‘Hybrid’ bit of the name comes from the way you can use the GPU of a graphics card with the GPU built into your (forthcoming) Nvidia motherboard. Yippee…
Hybrid SLI brings two new technologies: GeForce Boost and HybridPower. Boost combines the awesome rendering power of the forthcoming GeForce 8200 integrated GPU with a GeForce 8400 GS or 8500 GT graphics card. And yes, I’m joking when I say awesome; those GPUs couldn’t render their way out of polygon-light, vertex-lit paper bag - combining two won’t help matters much.
HybridPower sounds more interesting: when ‘graphics horsepower is not required, such as high definition movie playback* or emailing… HybridPower allows the PC to switch processing from a single GPU, or multiple GPUs in SLI configuration, to the onboard motherboard GPU’ automatically. The aim is toshut down unused, high-energy components and so decrease power consumption and noise.
HybridPower could be of use for a laptop, where battery life could be extended or gaming performance increased depending on what you’re doing. Sony has a similar system where you can manually switch between the integrated GPU and a gaming GPU, though this requires a re-boot.
However, the two graphics cards announced by Nvidia as supporting Hybris SLI aren’t mobile parts, they’re desktop cards. And this is why Hybrid SLI will be utterly rubbish:
1) If you’re gaming on an integrated, motherboard GPU in a desktop PC, chances are you don’t know PC hardware very well (if at all) and so won’t know who Nvidia is or what SLI does. Chances of such a person buying a Hybrid SLI graphics card to add to their integrated GPU? None whatsoever. Chances of a knowledgeable PC gamer user buying Hybrid SLI? Very small.
2) Integrated graphics have sod all performance, and the GeForce 8400 GS and 8500 GT only marginally more. Even using the more powerful GeForce 8500 GT with Hybrid SLI, I reckon you’ll have rubbish performance in modern games at respectable detail and resolutions.
3) While HybridPower has some potential for laptops, it’ll be pants in a desktop PC. If you’ve got a graphics card, you connect that to your monitor. However, if your graphics card is going to shut down every time you boot into Windows or quit a game, that’s not going to work. As most monitors don’t have two DVI inputs, Nvidia doesn’t want you to have to use two DVI cables either (one from your graphics card and one from the integrated GPU). The ideal situation would be for the Hybrid SLI-compatible cards to have a pass-through for the screen-out of the integrated GPU even when it’s powered down, but I’ve been told by an industry insider that that’s too tricky. Instead, Hybrid SLI looks like it’ll ask your graphics card to screen-out via the ingrated chipset’s output when it’s running and trying to render a game This means sending it’s rendered data back to the Northbridge-based GPU over the PCI-E bus which will cause inevitable lag from the bus and the arbitration at the Northbridge. If Nvidia tries to use this method with a a high-performance Hybrid SLI card, I’m betting you’ll see a significant performance drop from a conventional non-Hybrid set-up.
So, given that the people at which Hybrid SLI is aimed won’t know or care what it is (and therefore won’t buy it), that it looks like it’ll be inelegantly implemented, and that I reckon you won’t see much extra performance anyway, I’m betting it’s going to be utter crap. Expect Hybrid SLI motherboards for AMD soon (there don’t seem to be plans for an Intel version, oddly). Of course, only the tests on these boards will tell whether I’m right or not, but let me know your thoughts an Hybrid SLI below.
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* This despite Nvidia also wanting to sell you expensive graphics cards because they’ll accelerate and enhance HD movie playback with Pure Video HD. Well done, the Nvidia marketing team…