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SLI for NVIDIA Quadro: Installation Guide
This document provides the information necessary to successfully install and configure your SLI-
capable graphics boards and system. You may also review the full Installation Guide for
additional information. Topics covered in this document include:
•
NVIDIA SLI technology
•
Motherboard and power supply requirements
•
SLI hardware setup and configuration
•
Display driver installation and enabling SLI
•
SLI questions and answers
NVIDIA SLI Technology
NVIDIA SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology allows users to install and benefit from two PCI
Express (PCIe) graphics boards in a single PC. Just as dual processors or dual core CPUs
improve compute performance, SLI allows dual GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) to significantly
accelerate graphics performance. Professional users benefit by using SLI technology on dual
NVIDIA Quadro GPUs to span an OpenGL window across multiple displays, or to run a single
application per GPU. Additionally, the SLI connector offers dual GPU performance on a single
display by leveraging the capabilities of two NVIDIA Quadro GPUs.
SLI for NVIDIA Quadro – Definitions
SLI Frame Rendering: Combines two PCI Express graphics boards with an SLI connector to
transparently scale application performance on a single display by presenting them as a single
graphics card to the operating system.
Benefits:
- Visual simulation, broadcast, and video applications that are fill rate-limited will benefit from
using the split frame rendering (SFR) mode.
- SPECviewperf® and other applications that are geometry-limited will benefit from using the
alternate frame rendering (AFR) mode.
Requirements:
- Two identical NVIDIA Quadro FX boards (4400, 3400, 1400)
- SLI connector
SLI Multi View: Combines the power of two NVIDIA Quadro PCI Express graphics boards to span
a single hardware-accelerated OpenGL application window across multiple displays, run a single
application per GPU with multiple display outputs, or enable other flexible usage of two PCI
Express graphics boards.
Benefits:
- View professional applications over multiple displays to increase visual real estate.
- Run a single application per GPU to offload geometry processing to a second GPU.
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Related Manuals for Nvidia NVIDIA Quadro
Summary of Contents for Nvidia NVIDIA Quadro
- Page 1 Professional users benefit by using SLI technology on dual NVIDIA Quadro GPUs to span an OpenGL window across multiple displays, or to run a single application per GPU. Additionally, the SLI connector offers dual GPU performance on a single display by leveraging the capabilities of two NVIDIA Quadro GPUs.
- Page 2 Requirements: - Any two NVIDIA Quadro PCI Express graphics boards: NVIDIA Quadro FX 4400, 3400, 1400, 1300, 540, 330 Motherboard and Power Supply Requirements To support SLI, your PC motherboard must be PCI Express-based, with two available and adjacent PCI Express expansion slots. Both slots must be x16 mechanical with the following...
- Page 3 Now that we have reviewed SLI system requirements let’s proceed with the hardware installation by performing the following steps in the order given. Obtain the SLI-capable display driver (on the Quadro Utilities CD included with your NVIDIA Quadro graphics board or on the FTP site). You may also visit www.pny.com...
- Page 4 3. Follow the “Next” prompt to proceed with driver installation. You should see the message “NVIDIA Quadro FX xxxx has not passed Windows Logo testing to verify its compatibility with Windows XP.” This is because the SLI driver was not included on the Microsoft Windows XP CD.
- Page 5 “SLI Frame Rendering” mode. SPECviewperf is the benchmark that NVIDIA currently uses to analyze SLI performance for NVIDIA Quadro graphics. An example of the benchmark results we have recorded can be found at the bottom of this document. Before running the SPECviewperf benchmarks, please ensure the display resolution is set to...
- Page 6 Test platform: HP xw9300 workstation NVIDIA nForce Professional MCP Two AMD Opteron 250 processors (2.39 GHz) 1 or 2 NVIDIA Quadro FX 4400 graphics boards 2 GB RAM ECC Registered DRAM Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 NVIDIA graphics driver version 77.13 SPECviewperf 8.1 results...
- Page 7 Here is a checklist of things to look for when your numbers don’t match some of the numbers provided, or when applications will not run: 1. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4400 and 3400 graphics solutions require the PCI Express power dongle.
- Page 8 /sbin/lspci | grep -i NVIDIA | grep VGA You should see output that looks something like this: 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 00f8 (rev a2) 06:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 00f8 (rev a2) The numbers are the start of two lines (01:00.0 and 05:00.0) are the BUSIDs of your GPUs.
- Page 9 Can I take advantage of SLI and run four displays at the same time? Yes, you can drive four displays simultaneously by using the SLI Multi View mode – two NVIDIA Quadro FX PCI Express boards, each driving two displays. The two boards do not require the SLI bridge connector.