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NVIDIA SLI Coming to AMD 990FX, 990X and 970 Chipset Motherboards

You can't run NVIDIA SLI on AMD platforms for obvious reasons, but NVIDIA said in a blog post this morning that this won't be the case when AMD launches their next generation chipsets this summer. Tom Petersen, Director of Technical Marketing at NVIDIA, broke the news and made a couple jabs at AMD that can't be ignored. First was his comment that NVIDIA refused to grant SLI licenses for AMD chipset based motherboards because their CPUs sucked so badly. "Long term gamers probably remember that for a long time AMD offered great high-end CPUs, but in recent years, AMD’s stature as the preferred gaming CPU fell by the wayside and Intel CPUs have been the gamers’ choice. For this reason, we’ve only licensed SLI for motherboards with Intel chipsets." We highly doubt this is true as it was likely because AMD had their own multi-GPU technology called CrossFireX. Regardless, it looks like SLI will be enabled on AMD's 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets and that ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI will be buying licenses. How nice of NVIDIA to formally announce AMD's upcoming products for them too. I have a feeling this blog post is going to piss off AMD more than anything. This is also another blow to Lucid as their technology won't be needed to run SLI on AMD platforms. Uh oh... Things are getting ugly!

Long term gamers probably remember that for a long time AMD offered great high-end CPUs, but in recent years, AMD’s stature as the preferred gaming CPU fell by the wayside and Intel CPUs have been the gamers’ choice. For this reason, we’ve only licensed SLI for motherboards with Intel chipsets. However, we’ve been recently hearing chants of “SLI for AMD CPUs”, and figured that now is a great time to do it. After all, we want to make sure gamers can benefit from the new CPU competitive landscape and ensure they have NVIDIA SLI – the highest performance, most stable multi-GPU solution - to game on! According to Steam, 93% of all multi-GPU systems in use today use SLI. So today, we are pleased to announce that SLI has been licensed to the world’s leading motherboard companies for integration onto their upcoming motherboards featuring AMD’s 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets. ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI are among the first motherboard manufacturers to offer this new capability, with more coming on board shortly.

NVIDIA

Posted by | Thu, Apr 28, 2011 - 09:39 AM