Friday, October 17th 2008
NVIDIA 180 Series Driver with Multi-Monitor SLI Support Previewed
VR-Zone has posted a preview of NVIDIA's 180.10 drivers also known as the "Big Bang II" that will bring multi-monitor SLI support for GeForce owners. The VR article shows what this driver will offer in terms of SLI with multi monitor support and the performance effects of implementing multiple monitors in SLI mode. NVIDIA was supposed to publish the "Big Bang II" driver in September, but that never happened. There's still no release date, but at least now there's a prove that this driver is in development and will hopefully be ready before the end of this year. Check VR-Zone's preview here. If you want to give the early beta driver a try, you can download it here, but be adviced it's for Windows Vista 64-bit only.
Source:
VR-Zone
11 Comments on NVIDIA 180 Series Driver with Multi-Monitor SLI Support Previewed
It also says on the VRZone website than you can get Vista 32 and XP versions by signing up to their newsletter.
If you just connect one monitor to each card and run them without SLI. Then all of Card 1's graphical power is used to runder Monitor 1's image, and all of Card 2's power is used to render Monitor 2's image. So if you have two GTX280's, and you are gaming on Monitor 1, and only have the desktop on monitor 2, then you are wasting an entire GTX280 to just render a desktop.
When you do it with SLi, the graphical power is sent to where it is needed. So if you are playing a full screen game on Monitor 1 and only have your desktop up on monitor 2(with perhaps an IM program running or something like that), then the majority of the graphical power from both cards is used to render Monitor 1's image, while almost no graphical power is wasted rendering the desktop on Monitor 2. So your two GTX280's will both be used to render the game.
There is also supposed to be the ability to stretch applications across both screens, making both monitors appear as one monitor to games and other full screen applications. This means that if you have two monitors, you can play a full screen game using both of them.
I don't need to stretch a game across them, just don't want to turn SLI/Crossfire on and off between gaming and working.
:toast: