SLI?

[ulaoulao]

Does SLI have any advantage for emu's? I was just thinking about this and I dont see any technical advantage in using SLI for emulation. I just got two 8800 gts's and there is no difference via SLI. I may cash them in for a gtx. I would think the same goes for dual core. Any real point in having a dual core cpu?

Keep in mind this system is for emulation only it hardly ever see anything about 1024x768.

[Zach]

You will only see a difference in 3D accelerated games that are taxing a single video card on your setup. The main advantage to SLI is playing in higher resolution and boosting FPS, which isn't really saying much in Emulation anyway since most of the rendering is done in software anyway. As to how it effects hardware 3D systems, like N64, etc I don't know, but if it was taxing your system before, the SLI should have shown improvement.

[Chumly]

One GTX would be better than two GTSs running in SLI, especially if the most you'll be using is 1024x768. They're GTSs... a GTX will always look better. Adding two GTSs together will not make them capable of what a GTX is capable of, because that's not how SLI works.

Now, if you were to have a much higher resolution, say one that a single GTX (or even a single GTS for that matter) would not be enough for, then running an SLI set-up would help. As I understand it, this is because rather than having to display an image in a high resolution (i.e. a large monitor screen) which it could have difficulty doing, in SLI each card only has to display an image for a portion of that resolution (one half of the screen). In other words, in SLI the workload is split up between the two cards, but performance (visual quality) is not improved.

As for SLI/Crossfire vis a vis dual-core processors, you would be comparing apples to oranges. A dual-core/multi-core processor should only be compared to single-core processors. For gaming, a dual-core processor would help if you want to have other programs running while you are playing a game (e.g. anti-virus, another game, listening to music, etc.). Future games (and a few current ones) will also make use of dual-core.