Rumour control: Nvidia enables multi monitor SLI

Posted at: 4:22pm 17th October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

ForceWare 180-series drivers leaked, showing the first signs of ‘Big Bang II’

The huge amount of work and money that’s going into CERN shows that it’s difficult to follow up an event such as the Big Bang, but it should be easier for Nvidia to make a sequel to SLI, which was codenamed Big Bang when it was in development. Its successor, Big Bang II, has been spotted on a few roadmaps recently, and it now looks as though we know what it is. If this rumour checks out, then it’s a new driver that enables multi-monitor support on SLI.

It’s not the sort of monumental event you’d expect from a codename such as Big Bang II, but it’s a feature that arguably should have been provided a long time ago. ATI enabled OpenGL multi-monitor support on CrossFire setups in Catalyst 8.1, but Nvidia SLI systems (with the exception of some Quadro SLI workstations) still make your second monitor go blank if you enable SLI.

According to tech scandal diggers at VR-Zone, the new feature will be added in Nvidia’s 180 series of ForceWare drivers, and the site has a number of screenshots showing a leak of the 180.10 BETA driver in action. When setting up multiple monitors, you now get an ‘SLI focus display’ checkbox that allows you to clone the SLI display on one monitor using a second monitor. However, the site notes that the current BETA driver doesn’t yet allow you to stretch a 3D game over two monitors in SLI yet, and that even enabling the Clone mode results in a slight drop in performance in 3DMark Vantage.

The site also notes a few other issues, one being that with SLI enabled the second monitor is forced to run at the same resolution as the primary display. The driver apparently can’t run at a resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 in SLI on two displays either. Of course, the driver is very much at a BETA stage at the moment, which explains why there are a number of issues, and many of these may be resolved by the time a WHQL driver is released. However, Nvidia will have to provide more than just a Clone mode if it wants SLI on multi-monitor systems to be a big selling point.

Nvidia wouldn’t confirm the site’s findings to us, saying that it couldn’t comment on rumours or leaks. However, the driver screenshots look legitimate to us, and VR-Zone is also hosting the 64-bit Vista version of the driver, although the download time runs into several hours at the moment.

Have you got a multi-monitor setup that’s crying out for SLI graphics power? Should Nvidia have offered this feature from the beginning? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.