NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti PCI-Express Scaling

[diatribe]

SLI is dead since Maxwell. NV stopped optimizing drivers and profiles since Maxwell

Not true at all.

As of nVidia's latest driver, 411.63, there are still SLI optimizations being released. The following games are specified in the release notes:

• HOB
• Lake Ridden
• NieR:Automata
• Northgard
• Pure Farming 2018
• Raid: World War II
• Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017)
• TT Isle of Man

 

[stance_changer]

Can someone explain how physically blocking pci e connectors works? How can the system know that it is blocked. I assume that all the connectors are identical and each pin has the same bandwidth as the rest, but other than that, this is a mystery to me.

 

[Famorak]

So let me get this straight, if you have a new turing card and a M2 drive you take a performance hit? so better to wait for PCIe 4.0?

 

[king of swag187]

When SLI reached peak popularity, most people (and almost 100% of gamers) had large ATX, custom-built boxes. Hence, there was a large potential of selling them another card later on.

It's very different today.
First of all: many people game on laptops. I don't know how many... half? Maybe more.
We generally moved to smaller desktops as well - usually imposing a 1 GPU limit.

Nvidia is simply going with times. And clearly this strategy has worked for them.

I game on a laptop with dual 1080's and a 8700K lol, its smaller than my desktop by a alot

As to all the people that quoted my 32NM post, I meant with RTX series cards, not any other cards. they're still great for gaming lol

 

[ERazer]

So let me get this straight, if you have a new turing card and a M2 drive you take a performance hit? so better to wait for PCIe 4.0?

Depends on mobo how the pcie lanes its setup and how many pcie lane your CPU has.

 

[Jism]

Interesting, but I seriously doubt someone would use a platform as old as 32NM Sandy Bridge or heaven forbid, AMD FX

Still an FX, Bulldozer or Vishera in that matter, running here. It's doing great actually.

 

[king of swag187]

Still an FX, Bulldozer or Vishera in that matter, running here. It's doing great actually.

No doubt about it, but I meant to say "with an RTX card"

 

[Jism]

That card is way overpriced to be honest. The 2080 does'nt make sense either for being 100 ~ 200 $ more expensive and not doing that much better then a 1080ti.

It's just that there is no competition, and Nvidia is the new apple on the market with their exclusive iphone RTX editions.

 

[king of swag187]

I picked up a Windforce OC 1080 ti for $475 shipped, and a 7700K system w/16GB RAM for $450, so $925 total. So far its been good

 

[nemesis.ie]

So let me get this straight, if you have a new turing card and a M2 drive you take a performance hit? so better to wait for PCIe 4.0?

Threadripper would be fine in this case - with 3 x M.2.

 

[Salty_sandwich]

I cant afford to keep up with the pricing of new high end or even mid range graphics cards these days + the cost of building a whole new computer to run new graphics card, it got to a point where I just gave up with PC gaming and sold all my computer gear, ended up buying an Xbox One X and game quite happy on that, although after about a year I decided to build a Low end PC out of the cheapest second hand parts I could find locally.

I just cant justify the cost just to play games on a PC anymore, probs an age related as well as wallet related issue :/ …

 

[John Naylor]

The main thing I think that killed SLI was it had nVidia competing with itself. The 780 overclocked was faster than the 290x overclocked so the Ti version was going against twi 770s and twin 780s... it was an easy choice. Then came 9xx and nVidia took another tier and two 970s was 40% faster than a single 980 for the same cost. AMD had nothing to throw against it, so nVidia was losing top tier card sales to twin mid level cards. Yea a few games didn't benefit but the ones you wanted to play did. And when it didn't scale, you were maybe 10% slower than they 980 but with 2 you were as much as 70% faster. From a competition standpoint, improved scaling in SLI only hurts nVidia.... still find it curious why few questioned why 1080p scaled on average 18%, 1440p 33% and 2160p 56% .... the lower the resolution the more the scale was tipped against SLI.... but foir thoise who wanted 60+ performance at 2160p, they gave those customers what they wanted... they were still happy to sell ya two 1080Tis.... jut not two 1070s, so 1080 / 1440p scaling was nerfed.

 

[jaggerwild]

I picked up a Windforce OC 1080 ti for $475 shipped, and a 7700K system w/16GB RAM for $450, so $925 total. So far its been good

Now we can LOLZ at you windforce haa!!!

 

[king of swag187]

Now we can LOLZ at you windforce haa!!!

Can't believe that was months ago, that system is longggggggggg gone by now, I have no idea how, but I found a free 8700K at my job and so am currently rocking that and a Z390 Gaming X, and my old Gal, the Fury X. All these years she's still going strong.

 

[Hardcore Games]

My R5 2400G provides 8 lanes at PCIe 3.0 for a discrete card. I use a GTX 1060 and I have not had performance issues with it.

The next gen processors may be faster but it's overkill for my present video card

 

[tpapas]

great review!

still rockin a 3770k 32gb ddr3 with 2080 rtx on 3x1080 monitors for ultra wide.
still no reason to go towards ryzen.SLI ing 2 x2080s makes still more sense than upgrading to a new mobo ddr4 cpu, even with a performance hit. of course this on 2021, still not worth it currently

the optane 900p + 2080 config lowers the optane to 1.6gb/sec instead of the max 3.5gb/sec and the 2080 loses 3-5 fps. so what...

 

[529th]

Great review. I was limited not too long ago with my X58 rig and my GTX 1070

 

[AteXIleR]

It is(was) not facing its design limits yet.

After the coming 3000s series still will be room for the 4th 1000s to show themselves with full power even on the PCI-Express 3.0 x16 interface.
Perhaps, at the 5th generation we may see real disadvantages, but two more gens working properly in the following years is highly likely.

 

[Mykel67]

Still rocking a P67 - i7 2700 with PCIe 2.0 x16 and a GTX 1070. On a 1440p setup.

Monitoring the system while gaming show the GPU bottlenecking (100% use) on titles such a Witcher 3 or lately New World (alpha).

I was thinking of upgrading later this year, but I still can’t figure out if I’ll get enough fps for the price of a whole new rig (MB, CPU, RAM)...

Looking at this test I think it could work. What do you guys think ?

 

[Tomorrow]

Still rocking a P67 - i7 2700 with PCIe 2.0 x16 and a GTX 1070. On a 1440p setup.

Monitoring the system while gaming show the GPU bottlenecking (100% use) on titles such a Witcher 3 or lately New World (alpha).

I was thinking of upgrading later this year, but I still can’t figure out if I’ll get enough fps for the price of a whole new rig (MB, CPU, RAM)...

Looking at this test I think it could work. What do you guys think ?

I went from P67/2500K to X570/3800X. But i did not change my GPU - GTX 1080. Also on 1440p (165Hz).
I can tell you that games, especially multiplayer games became much smoother. Minimum fps went up by a lot. Even without changing the GPU.

For roughly $400 you should get a nice upgrade when buying new (B450, Ryzen 5 3600 and 2x8GB DDR4 @ 3200 CL16).

 

[Mykel67]

I went from P67/2500K to X570/3800X. But i did not change my GPU - GTX 1080. Also on 1440p (165Hz).
I can tell you that games, especially multiplayer games became much smoother. Minimum fps went up by a lot. Even without changing the GPU.

For roughly $400 you should get a nice upgrade when buying new (B450, Ryzen 5 3600 and 2x8GB DDR4 @ 3200 CL16).

Was the 2500K on bottleneck compared to the 1080 ? Currently the i7 is around 50-60% usage when the 1070 is at 100%...

Did you mesure the difference ? 10 / 20% ?

Thanks for your feedback.

 

[Tomorrow]

Was the 2500K on bottleneck compared to the 1080 ? Currently the i7 is around 50-60% usage when the 1070 is at 100%...

Did you mesure the difference ? 10 / 20% ?

Thanks for your feedback.

Yes based on my experience 2500K was a massive bottleneck. The last few years on it were pretty laggy.
Tho this is more to do with the 4c/4t nature of the CPU. Your 4c/8t i7 should hold up better.

The problem is that you cant upgrade to a faster GPU without bottlenecking horribly. 1070 is pretty well balanced with 2nd gen i7. I went a bit too far pairing 1080 with i5 tho.

Hardware Unboxed did a GPU scaling benchmark only weeks ago. What they found was that with RTX 2060 or faster you will notice CPU bottlenecking with older CPU's. This is 1080p tho:

 

[Mykel67]

Yes based on my experience 2500K was a massive bottleneck. The last few years on it were pretty laggy.
Tho this is more to do with the 4c/4t nature of the CPU. Your 4c/8t i7 should hold up better.

The problem is that you cant upgrade to a faster GPU without bottlenecking horribly. 1070 is pretty well balanced with 2nd gen i7. I went a bit too far pairing 1080 with i5 tho.

Hardware Unboxed did a GPU scaling benchmark only weeks ago. What they found was that with RTX 2060 or faster you will notice CPU bottlenecking with older CPU's. This is 1080p tho:

Very interesting video ! Thanks for sharing. Sad that they didn't try it with 1440p systems as it will use more GPU than CPU.

My config isn't far from the i7-2600K - GTX 1650S + 1440p instead of 1080p so it is clear that I have currently no bottleneck.
(Did you have a PCIe x8 maybe ?)

What will be interesting to see also, is the NVidia IO that will use less CPU for doing some realtime rendering...

but as you said, it's pretty sure that the 3070 will bring Sandy Bridge to and end, but I have some hope haha

This test also shows the 2080Ti being bottlenecked by the CPU :

RTX 2080 Ti with i7-2600 1080p, 1440p, Ultrawide, 4K benchmarks at Ultra Quality - GPUCheck United States / USA

We benchmark RTX 2080 Ti and i7-2600 at Ultra Quality settings in 48 games and in 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. With a review of specifications, price, power, temperature, and CPU bottlenecks.

www.gpucheck.com

.

 

[Tomorrow]

Nope i had PCIe x16 but my P67 only supported 2.0 speeds. I don't remember if it was Z68 or Z77 that brought 3.0
Doubt that 2.0 vs 3.0 affected my 1080 too much tho. It was mostly CPU limited due to four cores and no HT.

I had it overclocked to 4.7Ghz and that helped alot. So it could have been worse. Still have the board too: ASUS P67 Sabertooth. Back when TUF brand meant 5 years warranty and quality components. Tho over time the board has developed issue with the BIOS chip unable to hold any changes (id did swap out the battery). Thankfully it's socketed so at some point i plan to order a new chip to test since i keep the board, CPU and RAM around for tinckering.