NVIDIA's Big Bang II comes in September

[K404]

Damn you nvidia. Stop making me hesitate to make the 4870x2 a home in my rig

Thats part of the point of press releases and leaks.....

[Sampsa]

.. official WHQL PhysX drivers for every GeForce

My silly guess is next week for this

[strange|ife]

what has happned to display port btw?

off topic i know, but no vendor seems to be moving towards it for computer monitors.

sure wish they would, the spec on paper is superior to dvi

[Logos]

SLI was created and introduced by 3DFX before they got acquired by NVidia...Had a Voodoo card back in 1998, was following the infos about SLI...never heard of Big Bang one

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx

3dfx Interactive was a company that specialized in the manufacturing of cutting-edge 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. After dominating the field for several years in the late 1990s, by the end of 2000 it underwent one of the most high-profile demises in the history of the PC industry. It was headquartered in San Jose, California until, on the verge of bankruptcy, many of its intellectual assets (and many employees) were acquired by its rival, Nvidia Corporation. 3dfx Interactive filed for bankruptcy on October 15, 2002.

SLI

The Voodoo2 introduced Scan-Line Interleave (SLI) to the gaming market. In SLI mode, two Voodoo2 boards were connected together, each drawing half the scan lines of the screen. For the price of a second Voodoo2 board, users could essentially double their 3D throughput. A welcome result of SLI mode was an increase in the maximum resolution supported, now up to 1024×768. Despite the high cost and inconvenience of using three separate graphics cards (two Voodoo 2 SLI plus the general purpose 2D graphics adapter), the Voodoo2 SLI scheme was the pinnacle of gaming performance at the time[citation needed].

SLI capability was not offered in subsequent 3dfx board designs, although the technology would be later used to link the VSA-100 chips on the Voodoo 5.

Having since acquired 3dfx, Nvidia in 2004 reintroduced the SLI brand (now for Scalable Link Interface) in their GeForce 6 Series. ATI Technologies has also since introduced its own multi-chip implementation, dubbed "CrossFire". Although Scalable Link Interface and Crossfire operate on the original SLI principle, the algorithms used are now totally different.

[zanzabar]

what has happned to display port btw?

off topic i know, but no vendor seems to be moving towards it for computer monitors.

sure wish they would, the spec on paper is superior to dvi

display port is an hdmi cable ripoff with a fully encrypted duplex connection with a hash check to make sure that the line isnt tampered with it tops out at 1080P + 5.1 with a 5m cable and is inferior to hdmi and dvi in every way. it also adds about 2-8MS latency to the line making it useless in gaming and in general except for TV

so all that it is, is the farthest that copy protection could go without making the signal unusable

[Steensen]

SLI was created and introduced by 3DFX before they got acquired by NVidia...Had a Voodoo card back in 1998, was following the infos about SLI...never heard of Big Bang one

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx

That was the "original" SLI
nVidia's SLI is "Scalable Link interface", and thus nothing with each other to do, except the "brand name".

With 3Dfx it was on PCI slots, nVidia's SLI is on PCI-E slots, and thus much better, since they have dedicated bandwith to each slot, where as the 3Dfx with Woodoo cards needed to share the 133MB/s between the PCI slots, and acknowledged the benefit of AGP's much grater bandwith, and dropped the idea of SLI on PCI.

Sorry for OT.

[Logos]

That was the "original" SLI
nVidia's SLI is "Scalable Link interface", and thus nothing with each other to do, except the "brand name".

With 3Dfx it was on PCI slots, nVidia's SLI is on PCI-E slots, and thus much better, since they have dedicated bandwith to each slot, where as the 3Dfx with Woodoo cards needed to share the 133MB/s between the PCI slots, and acknowledged the benefit of AGP's much grater bandwith, and dropped the idea of SLI on PCI.

Sorry for OT.

never heard of concept things ? Intellectual property? Patent? No violation in this case, as NVidia acquired the "concept"...yeah your point on PCI>>>>>PCIe is not relevant If 3DFX was still alive, I guess they might have switched to PCIe as well...

[Seraphiel]

never heard of concept things ? Intellectual property? Patent? No violation in this case, as NVidia acquired the "concept"...yeah your point on PCI>>>>>PCIe is not relevant If 3DFX was still alive, I guess they might have switched to PCIe as well...

SLI and CF today has more in common with the ATI Rage Fury MAXX, than with any of 3DFX's offerings.

NVIDIA could have called it ILS or something completely different, never bought 3DFX, and the end MGPU products and techniques we have today would still be around.

MGPU was not the reason NVIDIA wanted 3DFX. NVIDIA just used the initials (not the full name) from 3DFX, probably because of marketing and PR - not intellectual property.

If there was an issue with rights or IP, then ATI would have to pay up as well, because SLI and CF are the same.

The above is just what I have learned, and I may stand corrected.

[postumus]

makes sense for it to be gt200b and or physix and or cuda, I wouldn't really expect anything that revolutionary.

[L1m1t.NL]

Santa Clara (CA) - After demonstrating beta drivers featuring GPU-accelerated physics on 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament III (GeForce GTX and 9800 boards), Nvidia is getting ready to release the official Windows driver.

This driver will support PhysX acceleration on all capable GeForce 8, 9 and GTX cards, while carrying Microsoft's WHQL certificate. More importantly, the new ForceWare driver is expanding PhysX support to all currently available PhysX titles on the market, including Ghost Recon 2: Advanced Warfighter, Warmonger and Cell Factor: Revolution.

We expect that downloads of free games such as Warmonger and Cell Factor will actually spike once again in August, since now those games will be playable on a variety of cards.

TG Daily

So OBR is right on this and let's hope for GT200b!

[saveus222]

That was the "original" SLI
nVidia's SLI is "Scalable Link interface", and thus nothing with each other to do, except the "brand name".

With 3Dfx it was on PCI slots, nVidia's SLI is on PCI-E slots, and thus much better, since they have dedicated bandwith to each slot, where as the 3Dfx with Woodoo cards needed to share the 133MB/s between the PCI slots, and acknowledged the benefit of AGP's much grater bandwith, and dropped the idea of SLI on PCI.

Sorry for OT.

the whole point of SLI was two cards in tandem.. whether they were in pci slots or agp slots or pcie slots doesnt matter.. lol

[WaxCactus]

all i can see is
First: Quad ****** Release February
Hybrid Shipped Spring
Spring Notebook Cycle
GT200 + ****

Big Bang II-Fall Will Focus on
- Now/WWW features
- SLI connectivity features
- Display connectivity
- Quality improvements
- Performance improvements
- OpenGL 3.0

[MnM]

SLI was created and introduced by 3DFX before they got acquired by NVidia...Had a Voodoo card back in 1998, was following the infos about SLI...never heard of Big Bang one

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx

Ohhh yeah those were the days .... I remeber my 2 x Voodoo2 and doing the built-in Quake benchmark..it was like Quake on steroids (the benchmark was running about twice as fast than normal)....

[Neuuubeh]

SLI was created and introduced by 3DFX before they got acquired by NVidia...

I keep remembering that 3dfx add of Voodoo 2 sli - the one with the 2 monkeys. "The power of 2" and "2 is more than 1"
Cant believe it was so long ago

[trinibwoy]

The only thing Nvidia SLI and 3dfx SLI have in common is the name. The underlying methods are very different.

[Neuuubeh]

its the idea that counts .

[Logos]

its the idea that counts .

yep ...

ot: also I had a Voodoo (1) in my first computer (Quake II, Unreal, HL)...I loved the card and I couldn't accept the fact that most 3DFX patents got acquired by NVidia, and the rest of the company bankrupted. Explanations for the 3DFX disaster was that they had a proprietary API (Glide)...yeah, we all know how DX and OpenGL prevailed in gaming very quickly.

[trinibwoy]

its the idea that counts .

If that was the case Nvidia could patent "using multiple GPUs to render a scene" and sue the pants off ATi. That didn't happen right? So no it's not the idea that counts...it's the process.

[WaxCactus]

Will Big Bang 2 work as HD4870X2 works? with one pcb and 2 gpus and built-in chip witch will act as a bridge between the two Gpus?

[BulldogPO]

Let´s just wait and see what that mighty Big Bang II will be, it can be just another renamed product.....

[SKYMTL]

No, new graphics card

Wrong.

Once again, Big Bang does not refer to the release of a new card.

[silverphoenix]

mebe it's them opening up SLI to all intel chipsets?

[rado992]

mebe it's them opening up SLI to all intel chipsets?

+1 IMHO. Maybe not all Intel chipsets though. Just look at what is posted in this thread

Originally scheduled to launch in November or December this year, Intel's Nehalem-based Bloomfield processors will now launch in September along with X58 chipsets, sources at motherboard makers have revealed.

However, the sources pointed out that CPUs and motherboards will not officially appear in the channel until early October.

Since Bloomfield CPUs are not socket compatible with previous Intel platforms, the accelerated launch is not expected to cause competition between the company's own products, although the same cannot be said for AMD's scheduled AM3-based CPU launch, noted the sources.

[bowman]

They've already announced nF200 chips for X58, a bit late for that to be the 'big bang'. You can go find the press release on Nvidia's site.

So what else is it? PhysX on the GPU? Not exactly 'big bang'.

[stangracin2]

its probably the 9800GTX+ renamed to a GTX 240