Does this mean that the framerate will be capped at 60 fps?

Didn't Nvidia use to have a quad card set up???

So it only works on their best cards which you only need one of anyways... Hopefully they expand it to their GTS's and GT's

Sounds pretty excessive to me and the airflow for the top 2 cards is going to suck.

the comment has already been made elsewhere (forgive me for not providing the reference, i forget it) that nvidia will not be allowing 3-way on the gt's or the gts'. as the new 8800gt and 8800gts 512MB perform as good or better than the 8800gtx, there is no reason to pay the price premium of $200-300 more for a card that performs the same...unless you can say that only your gtx and ultra series cards can do 3some's...er...3-ways. (thank you, that was the first time that joke has been made and i will be copyrighting that joke for future use.)

Of course they will open it up to their entire 8 series of cards... I would image they would open it up to their 6 and 7 range PCIE stuff as well... It would be. NVidia would NEVER earn the revenue required to recap the expense of developing 3 video card Mobo's if all the new Mobo's used the two most expensive NVidia cards. It would be a huge waste of money for their company.

In the first benchmarks of the system Crysis at max res with all settings maxed runs at an average of 37fps, but dips down to 17 at times.

Total waste of money but they'll sell a few. Some folks have to have the absolute fastest and are willing to blow 2500 bucks on a graphics subsystem, one that will be superseded within a year by a $400 single card.

An untrained not-attentive eye will not see pass 10 FPS. An attentive eye will no problems with 20 FPS.

VHS movies are perfect at 24 FPS... same with some 1080p content that is 1080p/24. This means that even a movie with high action content will do just fine at 24 FPS.

Now a trained eye (gamers) will not see pass 40 FPS heck I would say 35 is already pushing it...

If you REALLY REALLY need someone that can distinguish between 50 FPS and 60 FPS you have to find a professional formula 1 driver or a military jet pilot, and even those will only see at 60 FPS on extremely extremely strenouss situations. I highly doubt playing Crysis will cause enough stress to make their brain work at 50-60 FPS

Notice that this is a brain issues, eyes probably can "see" at hundreds or thousands of FPS... but your brain can only process so much at any given time.

@ Crazyhippo:

I can see certain light sources flicker @ 60Hz, as well at crt monitors set to 60Hz...

So yeah, 60 FPS is very necessary. Anything under 30FPS, most people can detect.

It may not be noticable in video playback, but in games it is VERY noticable. You try playing any first person shooter at 30 fps, and then at 100 fps, i think you'll change your opinion instantly

First to begin, for example: 1-)with a 8800GT Nvidia SLI you can get only an average 25% performance over a single 8800GT card 2-) have to pay $270 more. 3-)can't even get their drivers right to work in SLI. 4-)just take a look at Crysis in SLI. ...shame on you Nvidia .

Crazyhippo: I usually don't like to correct people but your post was all over the place.

All of your FPS perception stats are made up and nonsense. VHS is a 30FPS system, not 24. 50 and 60Hz scan rates are pretty easy to distinguish if you have ever had the displeasure of viewing a PAL CRT television running off of 50Hz power. There is noticeable flicker (especially in bright scenes) and it it very irritating.

Your eyes can not "see" at thousands of frames per second. They are an analog system that detects every bit of light that hits them. The chemical nature of the light detection in your retina takes a certain amount of time which is part of the fundamental mechanics of persistence of vision.

The internet is already chock full of poor information. Try not to add to it.

you need an fps buffer in game so when something happens like a action scene, you enter a detailed area, or some big explosion youre fps wont drop to a lowsy rate.

"An untrained not-attentive eye will not see pass 10 FPS. An attentive eye will no problems with 20 FPS."

I think most people will agree with me here, this statement is total crap.

you guys are all wrong. the reason why it is capped at 60fps is because no monitor in the world at 2560x1600 can run faster than 60hz. thus why support more than 60 frames per second?

its just vsync. you could probably disable it for higher framerates, but it will look exactly the same

nvidia are unable to put the tri sli on the gt's and gts' because they only have one sli connector but the gtx's and the ultra's have 2. this enables them to go and have a three way.
i see this technology showing it's true colours with the 9 series cards as it will be too buggy now, think of when sli first came out and how buggy it was then. we have only just got the hang of 2xsli and now they are bringing out 3xsli
at present it is just a marketing gimmik

The difference between 20fps and 60fps is huge and from 40 to 60 is very noticeable. Games such as Quake4 have their internal clock synchronized around 60fps, anything less will throw the timing off and can make things feel different. Difficult maneuvers (such as tight jumps) are affected. Notice that it's not just the look of the game that is affected but also the feel (the movement inside the game) that is affected.

Health human eyesight sees 70 frames per second or better. Not 10. A mere 10 frames per second is herky-jerky slow and crude.

Most movies are photographed at 24fps. The eye's "persistence of vision" works to fill the gaps between each frame being flashed. Some movie images, when projected using 35mm film, can still have problems with strobing, flicker and even picketing.

NTSC video runs 29.97 frames per second. The 70mm Showscan special venue theater format runs at 60 frames per second.

LCD monitors can get away with refresh rates of only 60Hz. The same refresh rate on a CRT monitor would be too slow and flicker would be a big problem. CRTs need 75Hz or higher.

To get back to topic, 3-way SLI just sounds silly. It would require a whole new kind of motherboard and probably one insane power supply.

Movies always look slow in fact when i watch divx movies sometimes they run at 60 fps or more when the player is trying to sincronize quickly the movie to the soundtrack. Probably you computer geeks notice that and in that situation the movie looks very smooth and way more real. So everything should be 120 Fps !!! Even if you have huge resolutions you will never have a good simulation until you get to those speeds. In fact in Japan or somewhere they are developing a new tv standard with 120 fps. If Japanese guys do that i bet it's good !

I don't know for sure, so please forgive me if I am wrong, but when people complain of "flicker" when they are viewing at refresh rates of 60hz, isn't it because of "beat freqencies" being generated between the 60hz display and the 60hz of the AC power sources that power your lighting and what not? Basically, anytime there are two signals super-imposed on one another that are not exactly of the same frequency, you get more than just the two original frequencies back out - namely you get the two original frequencies, plus the sum of their frequencies (roughly 120hz, which is definitely outside of our perceptive range), and then in the roughly 1hz range (depending on how far the two frequencies deviate from their nominal 60hz).

So this beat frequency is what causes flicker... not the "low" refresh rate of 60hz. On top of that, when people say a game is jittery, it is often an aliasing issue - if the screen is being scanned at 60hz, and the game is generating a new buffer's worth of data at say 25fps, then that means that sometimes it takes 2 scans of the monitor to get a new buffer generated, and sometimes it takes 3 scans of the monitor before a new buffer is ready (the buffer actually was completed just after the 2nd scan began, but well beore the 3rd scan started... but in order to prevent sheering and what not, the system waits for the 3rd scan which makes it seem like there is a lag, and thus it appears jittery).

You can see evidence of these artifacts when you look at a video-recording of a TV - you see that scrolling bar going across the screen. That is coming from the refresh rate of the monitor being filmed being slightly faster or slower than the refresh rate of the camera doing the filming.

Sorry for the long winded comments... but I just thought I'd throw that out there to see what people think.

More FPS always equals better in my book.

That being said, crazyhippo is making up info and throwing everyone off topic. Stop it crazyhippo.

3-way SLI is a gross excess that most people will never buy. I wish that they would get serious about this stuff and give you some sort of rebate for buying multiple cards... That the only real way to bring SLI to masses.

The eye is not a camera.

Read and Google about it and Crazyhippo is wrong.

http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

"So the conclusion is: To make movies/Virtual Reality perfect, you'd have to know what you want. To have a perfect illusion of everything that can flash, blink and move you shouldn't go below 500 fps."

I can tell the difference instantly when something is running below 30 fps. Also with monitors being so close to you I feel 60 fps is a minimum for proper gaming.

you should see the optomitrist. and also learn about frame rates and game playability as well as the lag factor. try putting the crosshair on a head in any FPS game while running at 10fps. noob. pfft.

3-way SLI Dual GPU cards = Hexa SLI?

I read about 3 way SLI on a german site. They put 3 GTX's i think in way and they had to use a 1200 PSU =O

Anyways this will be insanely expensive if anyone does it.

if people want to truly apreciate the visual diference between 30 and 60fps, a crt monitor will be needed (even an older one)why? lcds still suffer what we can call "ghosting and motion blur like motion" issues, of course these have been improved but they are still there, you can confirm this by dragging for example a window with your mouse being set at a 60hz rate, you'll notice the contents on the window becomes blury and hard to read due to this, but on a crt monitor they keep clear like in real life, like when you move or rotate something, for example an spoon, you don't notice it getting blurry and same occurs when playing games at 60fps without any motion blur related effects enabled on a crt: 3d images in motion looks as perfect as real life, but when they run at 30fps, even on a crt, the images in motion looks like they where a bit blurred and being rendered twice., similar to how they look on a lcd monitor even at 60fps.

pd: (non related to crt vs lcd) input response is quite noticiable at 60fps vs 30fps, much more smoother and reactive, specially for first person shooters.

60fps max is FINE. I play all my games with Vsync which caps them at 60fps and it looks BEAUTIFUL with absolutely no signs of lag.

I don't know where people are getting the fact s from but being an F1 driver or jet pilot does not miraculously increase your physical ability to see beyond the human eye's capabilities. Humans can only possibly see at best up to close to 30FPS, we can perceive though up to 75Hz depending on your level of focus, and actually if you are tired or not, it will go up and down.

There is a difference though in what you can SEE and what you can PERCEIVE. You can feel more than 30FPS but doubtful actually see it. Thats why games running more than 30FPS have that silky fluid FEEL to it and you can not really see the frames changing but at 15FPS you can litterly see the flicker between frames.

On a similar note, Guinea Pigs see more FPS than humans (excess of 30 fps) which is odd (except in a survival situation.)

The brain is capable of processing more FPS in reality but the human eye is not fast enough to actually process that many FPS to do so. Your brain is not technically the bottleneck here, it is the ability of your eyes.

We cannot physically see hundreds or thousands of FPS, its an imposibility, and an fyi movies are shot at 24FPS not because its the most optimal FPS for humans, its to save on film only. Anything less than 24FPS would look like crap.

Playable frame rates start around 24FPS, 60FPS is no real difference than 100, or 140 at that point its all relative and fluid.

As a gamer you always want the highest number of FPS as possible to buffer for the slow areas, if I can get 140FPS that means when I get into an intense scene it may drop to a low, but it will most likely be above 30FPS which is fluid play, no stutters. So we do always require the highest number possible.

FPS means the number of different images the game produces.

Monitor Refresh Rate relates to the number of (possibly different) images the Monitor shows.

The monitor should never be set to lower than 85Hz (on CRTs), because that is noticeable (more to some people than to others) and because it affects your eyes.

Now the FPS affect only the gameplay, of course low FPSs may make gameplay really bad and no one wants that. Video FPSs is usually at 24FPS if I remember correctly.

So, I think 30 FPSs is most probably fine for games, but a 60FPS cap is NOTHING to worry about for sure!

Oh, and for anyone suggesting higher FPS as buffer for slower areas of game, that makes no sense, unless you want to see outdated frames at that point. So that makes no sense, you need to worry about the minimum frame rate the game gives you being 30 or so.

the new samsung lcd's are 120hz at 1080p

http://www.mvktech.net/content/view/3198/48/

NVidia made a quad SLI (shown on the above link).

They also do have a quad GPU setup on their website, but it's not worth the money unless you have some super-hybrid program that would actually use the full functionality of the system.

You really only need 60 Fps on most monitors because the refresh rate is often 60Hz so the most that monitor will ever show is 60 Fps so even if you have more frames the screen will only show a max of 60 frames.