Nvidia took advantage of the mass of press descending on Las Vegas for CES to hold a pre-show briefing unveiling Hybrid SLI. 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. Integrated graphics processors (IGPs) have traditionally been confined to budget chipsets, but that won't be the case any longer. Starting this quarter, all new Nvidia chipsets for AMD processors will include an embedded graphics processor. All new chipsets for Intel processors will start getting integrated GPUs in the second quarter of this year. To begin, Hybrid SLI will be made up of two components: HybridPower and GeForce Boost. HybridPower is easily the most interesting of the two, allowing a system to literally shut down its discrete graphics cards when their pixel-pushing horsepower isn't needed, deferring to the chipset's integrated graphics processor. Commands controlling the process are passed over an SMBUS that's a part of the PCI Express spec, so a graphics card that supports HybridPower is required. Unfortunately, none of Nvidia's existing graphics products support HybridPower, but the company's next-gen high-end GPUs will.Systems that use HybridPower will have their displays hooked up to the motherboard's graphics outputs. In low-power mode, discrete graphics cards will be turned off, and the chipset GPU will handle all the rendering. Switch to high-performance mode, and discrete graphics cards will come to life and assume rendering duties. However, since the system's displays will be hooked up to the motherboard, the frame buffer contents for the discrete graphics cards must be copied over to the IGP's frame buffer. According to Nvidia, second-gen PCI Express provides plenty of bandwidth for this frame buffer dump. Latency is apparently a non-issue, as well.
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