News: SLI for Napa Refresh and GMA X3000 Details

I hope this hasn't been posted yet.

http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/itnews.php?tid=639535&starttime=0&endtime=0

nVidia is going to release a new driver in order to support SLI on the Napa Refresh platform. Since the 945GM doesn't support link splitting it's going to have to be implemented in x16/x4 mode, but it shouldn't limit performance that much.

This was an older review using X850XT Crossfire showing that x16/x4 isn't slower than x8/x8.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/mainboard/ati-crossfire-chipsets.html

This is probably in the case of dongle or SLI connector usuage since without them, the load on the PCIe links are going to be too heavy.

http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/itnews.php?tid=638462&starttime=0&endtime=0

The other piece of news is that the GMA X3000 on the G965 chipset seems to be an excellent IGP. It'll feature full hardware T&L, VS, and PS, and is ready for DirectX 10 with a BIOS update and a new driver. What's more, based on Intel's documentation, it looks to include unified shaders. 8 of them in fact.

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma3000/gma3000.pdf

This will mean that it'll be the first PC graphics chip with unified shaders and the first one with DirectX 10 support. I'll also beat the nVidia's competing 7300 based IGP and ATI's X700 based IGP to market. I'm willing to bet it'll be faster than them too since those seem to only have 4PS+2VS while the GMA X3000 has 8 unified shaders. It's also going to be clocked at a very high 667MHz. With multithreading logic to mitigate stalls from shared memory access, I'm pretty sure the desktop GMA X3000 will be faster competitive with the desktop X1300 HM and vanilla X1300. That seems to be very good company to keep.

The mobile version won't come until Q2 2007 of course and it'll only be clocked at 400MHz. The upshot though is that Vista should have shipped by then (cross your fingers) which means that the mobile version will have DirectX 10 support activated stock.