From Inq

Nvidia's Big Bang II is more of a whimper

Time to stop artificially breaking SLI

By Charlie Demerjian: Friday, 25 July 2008, 4:55 PM

WHAT DO YOU do when you suddenly find yourself in second place, trailing badly with no hope for the rest of the year? You stop artificially crippling your drivers and spin it to the users as magnanimous, welcome to Nvidia's Big Bang II.

The good folk at Chile Hardware were the first to notice it on a blurry slide. The obvious inference is to 'Big Bang', aka the SLI introduction, which was a big deal. Big Bang II is simply not. It is the code name for Release 180 drivers, and they are coming from September 08 to February 09.

R180 has five bullet points, 10-bit displayport support, OpenGL 3.0, SLI on multi-monitors, transcoding on the GPU, and some performance 'optimisations' over R177. Come autumn, they will be catching up to ATI on several key checkboxes, this is a big bang?

The only one in there worth getting excited over is SLI on multi-monitors, and that is kind of a sham. Nvidia will obviously tout it as the greatest thing since sliced bread, but they are just unbreaking the driver. They could have turned it on any time they wanted to, it works just fine in the Quadro line (1). Nvidia hurts their most loyal customer base by artificially turning it off in the normal card line. Why anyone thinks they deserve kudos for stopping breaking drivers is beyond me.

In any case, Big Bang II is a small step forward and it brings a few nice features and one very needed one. It is a real pity that their hand had to be forced to stop hurting users for margins though, but that is the way they operate. ĩ

(1) I wonder what this will do to Quadro sales, and thus NV margins?