SLI or Crossfire support?

As far as I can tell from the Mac Pro specs, there is no mention of crossfire or SLI support. I think you would have seen that mentioned as a plus during the keynote, or at least mentioned in the specs.

I don't know about crossfire, but NVidia has/had a few cards that could use SLI without motherboards that supported SLI. However these cards were really just two SLI GPU cards mated to one card design, needing a single PCIe slot. So unless NVidia/Apple start offering these double and quadcore GPU's, I don't think you will see SLI performance with the existing Mac Prop motherboard... but that is only my personal guess.

Tom N.

if you go like you are going to order one and configure it, it looks like you can get it with '4 x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB [Add $450]'.... sounds like sli....

The four graphics cards are so you can use eight displays.

Perhaps there will be a future Apple or third party software and hardware hack that will give SLI?

Split the video data path, send each half to a video card and combine the results with a adapter between the monitor?

4x 7300 = the performance of 1 7300, if you are only using 1 display.

SLI is a technology that NVIDIA has popularized through its gaming channels, but has no intention of using this expensive and "difficult to set up" (by typical end user standards) architecture in its main stream products. Nvidia intends on doing SLI on a single board, such as the upcoming FX4500x2 which will be 2 boards on a single PCI-e connector. future, more mature products, will actually have multi-core graphics processor or more elegantly solutions. for very high performance, NVIDIA is already working on external graphics engines.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadroplex.html

this particular example is dependent on SLI technology, but the next big this will be EXPRESSCARD graphics solutions, similiar in concept to above, to give true workstation performance for the mobile user.

nvidia's site lists SLI as a feature of the 7300, however you must install the forceware software which is only for windows.

Mac Pro PCIe details: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Conceptual/HWtechPCI/index.html#//appleref/doc/uid/TP40003027

This was posted on Futuremark, can't find the link, that unit starts at £17,000 and the top of the range model is yet to be announced. Needs at least 20 cpus to give the array enough data to process without bottlenecking!!

Crossfire and SLI are entirely possible but only if you are willing to run BootCamp and XP or Vista with the relivant drivers. Hope Apple acknowledge the demand as they are selling it as the most customiseable system yet.....

Then that means all nvidia would have to do is just release a driver for the Macs, right? It's just a simple wait for Nvidia situation or will it never be available for Mac?

I like the idea of that external Nvida solution, that's the way to go.

Provided the PCIe port is not bottlenecked, splitting the video data path to go out two PCIe ports is going to be a challenge with Apple's ideas.

These machines ARE NOT sli or crossfire... SORRY. It's a chipset on the motherboard that makes that possible. If Apple uses either they are stuck w/that company (ATI or NVIDIA). Dual core GPU are the future or wait till 2nd gen MacPro

NO SLI

No SLI or Crossfire, and both companies don't have any plans to release them on Mac.