XNA and SLI

Question

I'm looking at buying a new gaming PC on which to do some XNA development. Before I buy a machine with SLI graphic cards, does anyone know if XNA has any problems taking advantage of a SLI setup?

Answer 1

XNA is abstracted away from the hardware. I don't believe you can write code specific to certain cards (if you can you shouldn't). If you had that kind of code, you wouldn't be able to move the project over to an xbox 360. I believe you would want to go the directx route if you plan on using card specific features.

That being said, if you you a working SLI setup, you would surpass any minimum requirements.

Answer 2

The only consideration you need to make with XNA is the shader profile you code to ... that is, if you write custom shaders at all :-) aside from that, as long as the video card is dx9+ compatible, you should usually be fine.

Edit: According to the list of Supported Operating Systems and Hardware for XNA Game Studio 3.1

To run XNA Framework games on a computer running a Windows operating system, you need a graphics card that supports, at a minimum, Shader Model 1.1, and DirectX 9.0c. We recommend using a graphics card that supports Shader Model 2.0 because some samples and starter kits may require it.

Furthermore, according to NVidia's marketing material, the following cards are SLI, and support up to shader model 3.0

• NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GPUs
• NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
• NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
• NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GPUs
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 XT
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600
• NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE