the more I read the less I understand

I am in the final days prior to an order. I just read the Nividia topic in the General discussion thread.. I am concerned. It seems to say that 8800 series cards don't work well with Vista and SLI does not work at all. Many people are discussing their satisfaction with VISTA and SLI. I am becoming paranoid as I think about Vista. My interest is in racing and flight sim games. I have a Logtech wingman GT Formula Force GT wheel and a Saitek cyborg 3D stick. I am not wanting to sink +2000 plus into a puter and then have to buy new stick and wheel. What is your experience. I want 2x 8800 GT and want to be able to use it. I grew up vid card deprived and "as God is my witness I will not go card hungry again". Thanks and I have more questions to follow.

Thanks Tyler, for the reasoned response to a ramble. I have some basic more focused questions.

1. It's both game, and resolution dependent. Some games are more multi GPU friendly than others. For example, Call of Duty 4 seems to get a massive performance boost from SLI and Crossfire at resolutions I would not ordinarily expect a gain. For the most part, SLI is helpful at high resolutions, and even more so when enabling quality improvements such as AA and AF.

2. The only limitation based on operating system which I am aware of is for quad SLI. It will not (currently) work in XP.

3. Direct X 10 is of primary interest from a gamer's perspective. Vista is also more secure than XP. IMHO, Vista has taken some hits to it's reputation that it does not deserve. The fact that some mass market integrators pressured Microsoft into lowering the published minimum specs lead to reports of Vista being extremely slow. On a decent system with 2 GB of RAM and a modern core duo CPU, Vista is fine.

4. You'll want it. Once you start climbing above about 19 inches, you are pushing the envelope for performance of a single GPU setup.

5. A little bit. The important thing to remember, is that overclocking adds heat. When you add heat by overclocking, and then add further heat sources by selecting a multi GPU setup, you want to select enhanced cooling to accompany those selections. One of the sources for the reports of instability is no doubt in my mind, heat, and lack of proper planning to handle additional heat when new components are installed.

Illustrative example: Someone had good performance but experienced some frame rate drops with AA enabled at highest detail settings. They add a second card to SLI and take things up a notch, and suddenly, they see errors. The GPU temps seem normal, the CPU temps are within reason, so the only reasonable explanation is the drivers must be crap. What they don't realize is the northbridge controller on their motherboard is now baking away at 90*C and causing errors once their system hits periods of heavy load.

This is not to say this is the source of all errors, but you can avoid this type of scenario by requesting an adequate case and ventilation enhancements, or opt for the more expensive liquid cooling.


Edited by Tyler Lowe - 29 Mar 2008 at 5:03pm