R700 Supports 4-way Crossfire X?

[tvdang7]

i guess you could say " hey i have more video ram than you have ram" lol

 

[candle_86]

lol right now not all my ram shows up in dxdiag anyway 1gb for the crossfire, 2gb in system, and another chunck pulled by my lan card and another by my recently accurited xfi. System ram shows up at 2034mb lol

 

[Hayder_Master]

 

[X-TeNDeR]

Exactly.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

4way crossfire???

well obviously for those who wish to invest in such hardware will have to run a 64bit O/S unless M$ & ATi have found a way to use the gpu ram as bog standard system ram.


which wouldnt be such a bad idea - being able to convert your 'idle' gpu ram into ram which is use by your pc

 

[roberto888]

What they want with 8GB of VRAM? Anybody will use to prey on those monsters? I don't think so. Maybe the game developers. But they will be pleased with 4GB of VRAM too. Don't need 8GB. This is my mind. Sorry for bad English.

 

[btarunr]

What they want with 8GB of VRAM? Anybody will use to prey on those monsters? I don't think so. Maybe the game developers. But they will be pleased with 4GB of VRAM too. Don't need 8GB. This is my mind. Sorry for bad English.

It's not about what 8 GB can do, it's about what 8 GPUs can.

 

[lemonadesoda]

Architecture

Would that be 4x 2GB, or 8x 1GB memory?

It ISNT 8GB of independent memory, because the "same assets" are being stored multiple times in each memory bank. The GPU doesnt actually have 8GB to play with, only 1GB (or is it 2GB?). The rest of the memory are just COPIES of the same memory space on each GPU's local address bus.

P.S. I'd love to see a FPS or flightsim using all 8 DVI ports independently! WOW.

 

[btarunr]

Would that be 4x 2GB, or 8x 1GB memory?

It ISNT 8GB of independent memory, because the "same assets" are being stored multiple times in each memory bank. The GPU doesnt actually have 8GB to play with, only 1GB (or is it 2GB?). The rest of the memory are just COPIES of the same memory space on each GPU's local address bus.

P.S. I'd love to see a FPS or flightsim using all 8 DVI ports independently! WOW.

Technically it's 8 x 1GB GDDR5 256bit when the rig made to render a scene in AFR (Alternate frame rendering), where each GPU takes turns...I needn't explain, you have the know-how.

So the application has to load the same stuff (= textures, mesh, shader data, wireframe data) into all eight memory arrays. Same applies when the GPUs are made to render a scene in tiling. All 'stuff' should be available to all GPUs.

Since we still don't have motherboards with four full x16 2.0 slots, with four slots populated it means x8 2.0 bandwidth / card.

 

[Jansku07]

ot/ That guy from mahabharata; what's he drinking (milk)? /ot Wasn't there a project which used four 9800GX2s to crunch numbers? Was it a 4x 16x PCI-E mobo which they were using? I faintly remember this, so I might be wrong too..

 

[btarunr]

ot/ That guy from mahabharata; what's he drinking (milk)? /ot Wasn't there a project which used four 9800GX2s to crunch numbers? Was it a 4x 16x PCI-E mobo which they were using? I faintly remember this, so I might be wrong too..

For GPGPU it isn't essential that multiple cards be arranged in an SLI / Crossfire array of some sort. Parallelism is brought about by the driver. Remember, there's no video to play with, no SLI bridge to transport frames to a 'primary' card.

In reality, you can't arrange four 9800 GX2s in SLI. I wonder how they did it with four R700s though, since PCB has only one CFX finger.

 

[CDdude55]

OMFG... You will need a beast of a PC to handle that. And the cooling will be hell(literally).

 

[TheMailMan78]

I just heard "QUAD DAMAGE" in a quakish voice from the AMD camp.

 

[btarunr]

Haha. I miss Q3A.

The cons are many....8 GPUs and say hello to heat, power, mobo, micro-stutters, etc. But end of the day the fastest available consumer graphics would be made by ATI. That adds brand-value all the way down to Radeon HD4450. "Hey these guys make the fastest graphics configurations in the industry".

 

[Jansku07]

For GPGPU it isn't essential that multiple cards be arranged in an SLI / Crossfire array of some sort. Parallelism is brought about by the driver. Remember, there's no video to play with, no SLI bridge to transport frames to a 'primary' card.

I know that. I wasn't asking about 9800GX2 octaSLI support but the following
1) Wasn't there a project which used four 9800GX2s to crunch numbers? (crunch numbers NOT to do video)
2) Was it a 4x 16x PCI-E mobo which they were using?
3) /ot what's the guy drinking in your picture?

 

[Disparia]

I know that. I wasn't asking about 9800GX2 octaSLI support but the following
1) Wasn't there a project which used four 9800GX2s to crunch numbers? (crunch numbers NOT to do video)
2) Was it a 4x 16x PCI-E mobo which they were using?
3) /ot what's the guy drinking in your picture?

Yup: http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/

An MSI K9A2 Platinum was used, x16(x8) x 4.

 

[Jansku07]

Thanks for the heads up. =) So there aren't any 4x 16x PCIE (2.0) boards available anywhere?

 

[btarunr]

I know that. I wasn't asking about 9800GX2 octaSLI support but the following
1) Wasn't there a project which used four 9800GX2s to crunch numbers? (crunch numbers NOT to do video)
2) Was it a 4x 16x PCI-E mobo which they were using?
3) /ot what's the guy drinking in your picture?

1. I didn't say they did 'video' either. I said GPGPU use (general-purporse graphics processing unit) i.e. 'crunching numbers'. You can add as many cards as there are slots and PCI-E switches available, just that you can't call that a 'multi-GPU' except each 9800GX2 has its local SLI array.

2. Maybe, I don't know. It's impossibile that they used Skulltrail since the last two PCI-E slots are adjescent and 9800GX2 is a dual-PCB card. They must've used some NForce Professional based WS board which had 4 slots spaced out.

3. not drinking, blowing air into a conch. (Ancient-Indian for war-cry).

 

[Jansku07]

I misunderstood that you misunderstood me. Sorry

 

[Weer]

In THEORY this would be like having Quad-Sli GTX 280's.

BUT, let's see how the drivers hold the 8 cores together.

 

[Megasty]

1. I didn't say they did 'video' either. I said GPGPU use (general-purporse graphics processing unit) i.e. 'crunching numbers'. You can add as many cards as there are slots and PCI-E switches available, just that you can't call that a 'multi-GPU' except each 9800GX2 has its local SLI array.

2. Maybe, I don't know. It's impossibile that they used Skulltrail since the last two PCI-E slots are adjescent and 9800GX2 is a dual-PCB card. They must've used some NForce Professional based WS board which had 4 slots spaced out.

3. not drinking, blowing air into a conch. (Ancient-Indian for war-cry).

The Foxconn Transformer F1 would work:

 

[Disparia]

If we were to split hairs, there are flexible x16 to x16 adapters which would allow the use of double slot cards if the slots are single-spaced.

 

[mandelore]

In THEORY this would be like having Quad-Sli GTX 280's.

BUT, let's see how the drivers hold the 8 cores together.

wouldnt it be more like having 6 way sli with 280's? since the 4870x2 beats the crap out of a single 280?

 

[Cybrnook2002]

IM HUNGRY

You should edit to "DEEEEEEAAAAAAAMNNN"

 

[Polarman]

Wow! this is pretty insane. Now you can hook up your PC to your central heating and heat up the whole house for winter!