so you're screwed if you want dual dvi / hdmi out.. meh :-|

AMD / ATI seems as though they might have the upper hand.

too bad ATi already introduced this stuff a few weeks ago..........

Only one digital out? Not interested.

Add that to: Vista? Not interested.

This almost sounds like someone said, "Hey let's see if we can come up with something semi-useful to do with all that bandwidth we have with PCIe 2."

Unless they give the IGP its own dedicated framebuffer, this may chew up a fair bit of memory bandwidth (and HT bandwidth too, on AMD systems). If I'm understanding things correctly, when using the discrete graphics card all of the pixels for every frame need to be copied twice -- once to the IGP's framebuffer (which is presumably in system memory), and then back to the IGP when the IGP scans the frame out to the monitor.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the tech, it seems rather inefficient to me.

This Windows Vista-only technology seeks to exploit systems running Nvidia integrated graphics chipsets and discrete GPUs, allowing the two to work more closely together to improve performance and lower power consumption.

Hybrid SLI should be a boon for gaming notebooks, allowing them to turn off power-hungry GPUs to save battery life. Nvidia is also targeting this feature for enthusiast PCs, for whom it will first become available with Nvidia's new nForce 780a chipset.

Hmmm.... Vista-only and "enthusiast PCs". Really ??? No Win-XP support at all for these hybrid-SLI 'enthusiast' motherboards ? Really ?? That should go over like a lead-balloon in the PC enthusiast community. Or did the article-writer miss something important about "legacy" support in this brave new hybrid-SLI world? There are many current (and very expensive) professional 3rd-party apps, let alone many games, that DO NOT WORK CORRECTLY under Vista but work perfectly under WinXP, and where the developers have no intent of updating them for the new-OS. Lack of WinXP functionality of these hybrid motherboards in desktop ( let alone laptop ) applications is likely to be a sales-disaster. Some further clarification of the situation under WinXP is warranted - considering that the first wave of these motherboards is due to hit within 3-4 months, when both Vista SP1 and WinXP SP3 will only just be hot-off-the-press....

If drivers are good enough so you can mix onboard with discrete graphics card, it should be possible to mix different discrete graphics cards too, right ?

it would be neat if they could make the IGP be the physics processor.

Wouldn't it just be easier to have a discrete graphics card scale down, ala Cool 'n Quite? For example, instead of having a 8800GT turn completetly off when in 2d mode, why not just have it scale down to 100mhz core, 200mhz memory, and only 12sp's? Or something like that. The power difference would be neglible, and I think it would be a lot easier to do in the drivers.

The big win to me is the possibility of Express Card 'add on 3d accelerators' for laptops. Got a spare Express Card 54 slot? Slap in an 8800 GT module, power with the external wall wart, and have blazing 3D on your lappy's built in display. When you're traveling, retain your normal battery life by relying solely on the IGP.

A lot of people would like this, not just notebook users. If properly implemented, this would be an awesome feature. So often, we don't need the full power of our video cards, so why run them and waste electricity.

A good step in the green direction.

The AMD hybrid crossfire can pretty much manage to play Crysis on medium at 1024x768 resolution. The article is on [H].

"GeForce Boost is really designed for budget systems where discrete and integrated graphics solutions offer similar horsepower—trying to boost a mid-range or even high-end GPU's performance with a pokey IGP can actually decrease performance, Nvidia says."

So are you boosting Crysis from 2fps to 4fps? LOL! Also, is NV bundling the board with a discrete card? I doubt anyone would opt for a discrete card if the IGP can already handle the basics. I guess the benchmarks will prove the board worthiness, but making AMD performance users pay extra for such a feature is nonsense.

This sounds strangley familiar to something AMD/ATI are also developing / have developed.

At last!! Now someone make apple put high end GPUs in their laptops..that's the only reason I don't have one :)