Question nVidia kills off SLI

[jpiniero]

NVIDIA SLI Support Transitioning to Native Game Integrations - VideoCardz.com

With the emergence of low level graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, game developers are able to implement SLI support natively within the game itself instead of relying upon a SLI driver profile. The expertise of the game developer within their own code allows them to achieve the best...

videocardz.com

It's "transitioning to native game integrations" but that's basically killing it off since no developer will bother.

 

[randomhero]

Basically, a non news. Multi gpu is dead for quite some time.

 

[Artorias]

Good. Focus on creating the best singe card you can make which 99% of the market cares about.

With how big these cards are nowadays you wouldn't even be able to slot them in and maintain good airflow anyway.

 

[brianmanahan]

i thought about trying it many years ago because it would've been the most cheapest option up front

but all the microstutter problems people talked about kept me away from it

 

[CP5670]

I did SLI once 15 years ago and never did it again, after I realized I was spending more time getting games working properly with it than playing them.

 

[MalVeauX]

I think its a good thing to not focus on SLI or any multi-card approach for gaming. Not against multi-GPU (the idea of more GPU on one card). Just against the idea of needing two discreet GPU cards, each with separate cooling needs and separate power needs. The case requirements become silly. The cooling is a disaster. The performance gain is simply not as impressive compared to what can be done with a single card now. Plus for everyone who wants to move up a tier every few years, they're double-purchasing. Obviously the market simply didn't support it. Similar to how multi-headed gaming is also virtually non-existent either, as eyefinity and hydra vision and all that came in and people wanted their massive wide field gaming experiences (myself included) but ultimately it just flopped and is no more. 99.9% of the people playing games are doing it on a single monitor from a single GPU and it's not the top tier stuff either.

Very best,

 

[GotNoRice]

I used SLI and Crossfire many times in the past. Shame to see it go away. DX12 multi-GPU is BS. Everyone knew from the moment they announced it that hardly any game developers would bother with it. Now you have $700-1000 cards (3080) that don't even come with an SLI/NVlink connector anymore - so even if you are lucky enough to play a game that actually has working DX12 multi-GPU, it won't be an option for you. With the 3090 being the only card of this series to even have the connector, that is even less motivation for game developers to implement multi-GPU going forward. Sort of like some strange anti-consumer reverse chicken-or-the-egg scenario.

If SLI still worked, I'd probably be picking up a 2nd 2080 right now, used, cheap, instead of worrying about trying to get a 3080.

SLI got me through the cryptocyurrency GPU price-inflation. I had been running 2x GTX680 on an overclocked 2500K. I upgraded to an overclocked 5820K on an X99 motherboard. Since that CPU and board could support 3 GPUs, I got a third GTX680 and ran triple-SLI for another 2 years instead of buying a new card. It worked great for me. All the games I played had/have great SLI support. Combined GPU performance was better than a 980ti. Only catch was being limited to 2GB VRam but I was running a 1080P monitor at the time. I still use those 3 cards in my backup computer, and they still run great with DX11 SLI.

This could be an interesting opportunity for AMD to embrace multi-GPU. Real traditional Multi-GPU, not this "shift all work to the game developers and cross your fingers that they do your job for you" BS. So even if a top-end AMD GPU can't compete with a top-end Nvidia GPU, maybe 2 or 3 together can... Before I ran GTX680 cards in SLI I ran 2x 4870x2 in Quad-Crossfire. That ran just as well as triple SLI did.