From an article posted today on Tomshardware.com... I'm completely bummed about the following quote... I was all hot and bothered about getting one of the new NF4 boards for the sake of an SLI upgrade path but it appears that SLI actually slows down FS2004 and presumably other sims... ------------------We did, however, detect a decline in performance with SLI in Flight Simulator 2004 as well versus a single card, despite the fact that FS2004 cannot run at all in SLI mode, or put another way: even if only one card of an SLI system is operating, performance falls below that of a computer with just a single graphics card installed. Not by much, but by a measurable amount. ---------------------Caveman

I would be willing to bet that this technology is just ahead of it's time. FS9 is CPU intensive- I don't think the graphics card is really the bottleneck. It will probably only work wonders in games that are very GPU intensive, such as games that use lots of shaders.In FS9- The CPU has to parse the scenery data, and then upload all those polygons to the GPU. This won't be any faster with two cards. However, in a game like Doom 3 or Half-life 2, the CPU just says, "here's 5000 polygons- make them look like water with the sun reflecting off them, and throw in some refraction while you're at it"Basically, the future of gaming is procedural shaders. All those neat effects in Doom 3 and HL2, and Far Cry will eventually be used for just about everything. Like the example above, you won't need to load textures to the card- you will just tell it "make these buildings red brick". This will offload a lot of work from the CPU. Unfortunately, I think the flightsim genre will only benefit marginally from this. You can't make procedural shaders to replace the 18 gigs of land use, and terrain data required to render the world. BUT it will benefit when things such as weather can be done procedurally.

It's fairly predicted I think. With upper end video cards the limiting factor is the CPU in most instances. Put two cards in SLI mode and you can guess it will take a tiny bit more of the CPU's capacity to drive the 2nd card, so there you have it--an overall decrease in FS performance when compared with a top end card like X800XT or 6800 series as you bleed off a few CPU cycles to deal with the second card. Were the game most video card limited, you would see the predicted near doubling of throughput. What we really need is to get FS moved over to greater tasking of the awesome power of these new GPUs. Kind of like most other realtime 3D games do! Noel

Tomshardware isn

Oh yeah I remember Voodoo SLI! 2 12 meg monsters lol running need for speed and half life ;-) those were the days eh?Randy Smith

Yeah that was what I always dreamed about but never could afford :D. Creative labs Voodoo 2 12 mb was the first video card I bought. Kicked #### is all I have to say. SLI is awesome really. Many buys a SLI ready 6600 and then when they need more performance they will just get another 6600 so you can save a lot of money that way. I think two 6600:s would be faster than one 6800 ULTRA but I don

For a game like FS where system memory and CPU matters most 2 cards won't make much a difference vs. just one card