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SLI just about dead yet?

cmdrdredd

cmdrdredd

Lifer
It seems that SLI is less and less supported, is it about time to throw in the towel on SLI? I was going to post this in the general V&G area but I'm asking about SLI specifically.

What's the future looking like for SLI? Aside from chasing benchmark numbers is it even worth it?
 
Well only a small number of users even bothered with SLI to begin with, and along with poor support in most games if at all. So it is no surprise to that it is on life support.
 
cmdrdredd said:
What's the future looking like for SLI? Aside from chasing benchmark numbers is it even worth it?
Click to expand...

In my opinion, nope.

But Nvidia will continue to support as long people are willing to drop serious cash for multiple cards. The hard-core PC enthusiast will continue to chase every FPS they can get.

However, the game publishers don't seem to share that same outlook. SLI ain't what it used to be.
 
I dunno. I never felt the need even when it was considered the cool thing for gamers.

Is Vulkan getting popular? If people think they can get better looking games with the same hardware, it might explain the desire to use less expensive hardware or just one card.
 
shortylickens said:
I dunno. I never felt the need even when it was considered the cool thing for gamers.

Is Vulkan getting popular? If people think they can get better looking games with the same hardware, it might explain the desire to use less expensive hardware or just one card.
Click to expand...

I don’t see a lot of Vulkan games and I did think at first that dx12 would be more used and help performance but it doesn’t seem to be right now. I also remember reading that dx12 would have better mGPU support which doesn’t seem the case either.

The whole reason I asked was that I have been looking into getting new GPU hardware and found a 1080ti vs 1070ti SLI article and there was a lot of games that lost fps with SLI and many that don’t scale well and a 1080ti still won. There was a time when two mid level cards were faster than a single top of the line card. Doesn’t seem to work that way anymore.
 
SLI no longer has any appeal to me, and that's really saying something, either about SLI being terrible or my age, or possibly both. I've always had SLI since it started with Nvidia. I know, I know, 3Dfx had it first, yeah yeah. I started SLI with NVidia's Geforce 6 series. It was necessary and just awesome to have two cards in SLI. Acceptable performance in the latest titles couldn't usually be achieved with just a single card, not at 1600x1200.

My memory of those days is starting to fade, but I remember SLI getting better over the years. These days a single card is plowing through my games at 3440x1440 with great FPS and no SLI headaches.

Seriously, I get more FPS in BF1 with a single card than I did with two 980ti's and the same resolution and settings. That is saying a lot right there.

Anyway, it sucks now. Yep.
 
Last year I defected from AMD to Nvidia based on availability and bought a 1070ti, after having used Crossfire for years.
As soon as prices are once again "reasonable" (a relative term), I'll be adding a second 1070ti for SLI.

While many reasons have been floated, one that hasn't been mentioned is multiple monitors.
I used 5 with AMD, but it seems that I am limited to 4 with Nvidia, so I actually use 3, although I will be stepping up to 4k versions to compensate later this year.
Crossfire or SLI both allow excellent framerates when using the higher resolutions that multiple monitors provide, and I don't see that need going away any time soon, based on projected card development.
Multiple monitors is a niche, but many of us still use them, so Crossfire/SLI still fills that need to be able to play at the same framerates with multiple monitors, as a single card on a single monitor.
 
I used to do triple monitor and 290 CF. The amount of times I could get both of those things to work without some issue was maybe 3 in 10 games. Absolutely not worth it IMO.
 
shortylickens said:
I dunno. I never felt the need even when it was considered the cool thing for gamers.

Is Vulkan getting popular? If people think they can get better looking games with the same hardware, it might explain the desire to use less expensive hardware or just one card.
Click to expand...
I casually looked into Vulkan development and it seems like a complete beast to implement. I'm going to try working with it when my life gets less hectic, but I've never heard anyone say it's anything other than difficult to work with.
 
Chaotic42 said:
I casually looked into Vulkan development and it seems like a complete beast to implement. I'm going to try working with it when my life gets less hectic, but I've never heard anyone say it's anything other than difficult to work with.
Click to expand...

This is why Wolfenstein II has so many issues I think. It still to this day crashes quite randomly. I don't remember DOOM having any trouble with Vulkan but that was also ID software themselves who have always been very talented. It also had a OpenGL fallback mode as well which ran great too. I think many developers will have trouble with Vulkan.
 
In my gaming life time i have had sli 560tis, 670s and 970s but for the next gen i won't be going sli anymore. I've started to come more and more games that don't properly support it.
 
Maybe NV could end the feature and make the cards a bit cheaper.

How does DX12 Multi Adapter fit in?
Assuming it ever gets going good.
 
I remember going from to GTX 780s in SLI to a single 980ti. I thought my SLI 780s were supposed to give me similar performance to the 980ti so I was always hesitant to go ahead and buy it, but that single 980ti was so much smoother than my 780s. I will never go back to multi gpu.
 
Only time I ever did it was using some 7900 gts while playing LOTRO. Never had any issues and it was a noticeable improvement over the solo card.
 
With techs like Infinity Fabric, soon all video cards will be like SLI/XFire. Except they won't have all the issues they had in the past.
 
SLI and Crossfire have always been niche and not supported by every game. In this age of Kickstarters and Steam Early Access support is even more spotty, but when it works it's brilliant. The only reason I have SLI currently is because my it was an optional upgrade for my laptop down the line after purchase and because my favorite games have excellent SLI scaling and support.

In the future I don't think I'm going to bother with laptop SLI, as I doubt they'll have the flexibility of this machine anyways. I'll only consider it on the desktop if the games I'm looking into/playing at the time I build one support SLI.
 
I sure hope not, since I'm running two GTX 1080 in SLI and water cooling both.
Why ? Two is better than one !
I also have two monitors, for the very same reason.
 
Lisle said:
Why ? Two is better than one !
Click to expand...

....

Two GPU is most definitely not better then one.
Maybe if your crypto mining...
Maybe if they scaled 100% actually give me even 33% scaling and i wouldnt complain as much, but it doesnt.
Nvidia has the worst driver support for SLI.

Infact its gotten worse then it used to be with the older gen cards when you could manually set the cards to render.
(render 1 and render 2)

SLI causes micro shuttering, as well.

I can go on and on about how much fail SLI is, and this is coming from a person who used to SLI/Xfire in all my builds.

So sorry to tell you this but, a Single 1080 Ti >>>>>>>>> 2 x 1080 GTX.
Why?
Because that Ti has more ram, will most likely run flawlessly with any game that comes out on 0 day, with minimal driver support.

Also you wont be at the mercy of Nvidia's lazy driver department rolling out SLI drivers for a game which most likely you would be done playing with.
 
I'm aware the TI have 11Gb but I stupidly bought two founders editions when first offered.
They both have water blocks so I do not have the noise or the heat.
This rig is still an ongoing process.
 
aigomorla said:
....

Two GPU is most definitely not better then one.
Maybe if your crypto mining...
Maybe if they scaled 100% actually give me even 33% scaling and i wouldnt complain as much, but it doesnt.
Nvidia has the worst driver support for SLI.

Infact its gotten worse then it used to be with the older gen cards when you could manually set the cards to render.
(render 1 and render 2)

SLI causes micro shuttering, as well.

I can go on and on about how much fail SLI is, and this is coming from a person who used to SLI/Xfire in all my builds.

So sorry to tell you this but, a Single 1080 Ti >>>>>>>>> 2 x 1080 GTX.
Why?
Because that Ti has more ram, will most likely run flawlessly with any game that comes out on 0 day, with minimal driver support.

Also you wont be at the mercy of Nvidia's lazy driver department rolling out SLI drivers for a game which most likely you would be done playing with.
Click to expand...

I had 2x GTX 1080 and when SLI worked 2 x 1080 GTX >>>>>>>>> a Single 1080 Ti

SLI hasn't suffered from microstuttering in some time now so not sure where you're getting that from.

The whole purpose of DX12 is for devs to take back control and remove the need for AMD/NVIDIA profiles. Now we're seeing DX12 is not what it's cracked up to be, we were better off with DX11 and vendor profiles that actually did work instead of relying on lazy ass developers who can't be bothered to implement multi-GPU support.

The only reason I purchased an Asus Strix 1080Ti is because the last 4 games I played did not support SLI. But when a game did support SLI, my GTX 1080's were faster in 4k than any other 1080Ti out there.

One of my regrets with the 1080Ti is that in games that do support SLI, my 1080Ti is considerably slower in 4k, whereas I would get 4k 60fps locked with dual 1080's. And I never saw any kind of microstuttering whatsoever.
 
There is a price to be paid trying to stay on leading edge.
One draw back is that games being most demanding, developers game the masses.
The tecnology curve most follow is removed 4 years ?
 
nVidia/AMD should send some engineers to go live at Unity, Epic+Unreal and Crytek (or whoever maintains Cryengine now) and have them build out multiadapter into the base rendering engines. The only way we'll see a significant portion of DX12 and Vulkan multiadapter is if its a nearly zero effort toggle switch built into the most popular game engines
 
There are some big tradeoffs to SLI IMO. You lose fast-sync, frametimes aren’t as consistent, and it costs double.
I have SLI disabled in my main rig, because one 1080ti is enough to do games at 3440x1440 @ 100hz and I'd rather have fast-sync enabled.

It is best to get the fastest single card you can afford IMO.
 
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