Nvidia Releases Quad SLI Drivers

Ever had the urge to add a four-GPU, high-definition graphics to your wicked home-brew PC? Well, Nvidia has the drivers for you.

Appealing to the high-end do-it-yourself market of gamers and other computing aficionados who’d sooner shoot off their right thumb than buy an off-the-shelf PC system, graphics developer Nvidia has released the Nvidia ForceWare 91.45 graphics driver with Quad SLI support, enabling home-brew builders to combine the graphics processing of two Nvidia FeForce 7950 graphics cards in either AMD Athlon or Intel Core 2 Duo systems running Windows XP/2000.

Not that any of this will be cheap: the two video cards—each of which pack a gigabyte of graphics memory—will set back all but the most-connected of builders back at least $1,000, and you need a display capable of 2560 by 1600 pixel resolution just to get started. Plus your box needs a Quad SLI-compatible motherboard with two full-bandwidth X16 PCI Express slots free, and an appropriate power supply.

But the results can be stunning: by running two GeForce 7950 cards in parallel, the system can achieve near movie-like resolutions, high frame rates, and stunning image quality for outstanding gaming experiences. Not that a Quad SLI solution is four times faster than a traditional graphics card…but it might just be four times more hip.

“By offering this level of graphics performance to the innovative minds of PC enthusiasts who prefer to build and tune their own systems, we expect to see ‘maximum performance’ redefined,” said Ujesh Desai, Nvidia’s general manager of desktop GPUs in a statement. “For the ultimate gaming platform, you can’t go wrong with a system built around a NVIDIA nForce SLI MCP-based motherboard and a pair of NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics cards and completing the set-up with a top-of-the-line CPU and a widescreen display.”