Miller on Nvidia's Hybrid SLI

Michael Miller - eSeminars Fri May 9, 10:25 AM ET

A while back, I wrote about ATI's entry into hybrid graphics with its 780 chipset. Tuesday, it was nVidia's turn with its new Hybrid SLI solutions, called the nForce 780a SLI and GeForce 8 series, aimed at enthusiasts and the mainstream market. What makes nVidia's solution stand out is its emphasis on power savings, where nVidia can claim to make systems that are much more efficient than other solutions that have discrete graphics.

In nVidia's Hybrid SLI design, motherboards based on these chip sets put GeForce GPUs directly on the motherboard (and the company calls these mGPUs, though they appear to be pretty much normal GPUs with mid-range capabilities, such as Direct X 10 support). Then you , but are designed so that you can also add in a more powerful discrete GPU add-in card.

When you are just doing typical computing tasks, such as web browsing or word processing, the motherboard shuts down the add-in board and just uses the motherboard graphics, using a feature nVidia calls "Hybridpower."

For mainstream users who play games, Hybrid SLI lets you use both the graphics on the motherboard and a mainstream add-in board, which should give better performance. (As with the AMD solution, it's not appropriate for an enthusiast-level high-end graphics board, which will offer much more performance, but won't benefit from the hybrid graphics.) nVidia says that mainstream users can get up to 50 percent better performance by using the hybrid graphics.

Today's announcement is for eight motherboards all using AMD's Phenom processor; Hybridpower works with either the GeForce 9800 GX2 or the 9800 GTX graphics cards; while the GeForce 8400 GS and 8500GT both support the hybrid graphics, which nVidia is calling GeForce Boost. nVidia plans chipsets for Intel CPUs and for notebooks in the third quarter.

I love the idea of powering down components that your system doesn't need, so Hybridpower works for me. I can only hope nVidia extends this concept to more products and that other chipset makers follow suit.

Originally published on Michael Miller's blog, Forward Thinking.