NVIDIA Announces Hybrid SLI, Increases Performance, Saves Power

Posted on Jan 7, 08 05:59 AM PDT

[CES 2008] A number of computers have two types of graphics processors: a fast one (or more), in a discrete graphics card and a more basic one, in the chipset that is soldered on the motherboard (called integrated GPU). Most of the time, the integrated GPU does not do anything and is simply “wasted”.

Hybrid-SLI uses this integrated chip for two things: increase overall performance, or reduce power consumption. The latter works like this: when no heavy graphics processing is required, the computer shuts down the powerful GPU, and uses the basic GPU to drive the display. It seems like a simple idea, but the engineers behind it had to solve difficult problems to make this work. SLI-Hybrid should be transparent to the users.Hybrid-SLI requires hardware changes, so only upcoming will support it.

My Vaio SZ has a little switch that chooses between the GeForce 7400 and the integrated graphics. It requires a reboot, but saves battery life. Apparently, my next computer will do that by transparently, in real-time. There is a lot more to SLI-Hybrid, so stay tuned.

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