SLI is really not Dead if you Have a SLI rig

[Lycanwolfen]

Nvidia SLI is dead for the reason they did not want people to buy cheaper cards to have the same performance of a high expensive one. Also because the real hard core gamers got soft. Like in wanting the game to support it in settings. That was the biggest sorta thing I have seen over the last 20 years. I run SLI and all my games support it just fine even though there is no setting in the game itself. Reminds me of when I had my voodoo2's in SLI people did not understand how it works so they never learned how to configure it. SLI can be supported is almost any game if you do it in the driver not the game. When you do it in the driver the game only see's one card. But how it reads that card is dependant on the driver how it's configured. I take a cyberpunk for an example. It says it does not support crossfire or SLI. Ok I run all my games in 4k res so this is a perfect example. I have two 1080ti's in SLI and I disabled the SLI in the driver open the game and I get average 20 fps because it's an old card duh. But when I Enable SLI and go into the driver set it to quality and SLI enabled and open cyberpunk it still only reads the one card but my FPS now has jumped to average 45 to 55 FPS in 4k. Which means its using both cards as one. Which is what SLI suppose to do. Basicly one card is runing 1080p on the bottom half and the other is rendering 1080p on the top half in the 4k setup.

Now I'm looking to upgrade my systems someday and you notice no all the motherboards only come with a single slot PCE-E. Nvidia and AMD dropped the dual cards and now Motherboard companies dropped extra PCI-E slots. Now Gamers buy a 4090 and think performance is great 130 FPS with DLSS. But DLSS is not native true gaming. It's a software patch to the AI built into the card to lower the res then scale it back to the 4k. I was a hard core gamer and for the price of a 4090 I would expect it to run native 4k without any DLSS on any game over 130 FPS.

But its does not do that. And I'm like why world I pay that money for a POS card that cannot render 4k without any DLSS and trickery.

Gamers used to demand better. Now its all about the DLSS performance and driver updates to the AI to scale down your Games then scale them up to 4k or 8k.

I might just buy two 2080TI's and Nvlink them because I quite sure I could smoke a 4090 with ease in a SLI setup.

I'm holding out though to see if Nvidia 5000 series gets back to there roots of Hard core Gamer delights.

 

[ir_cow]

I might just buy two 2080TI's and Nvlink them because I quite sure I could smoke a 4090 with ease in a SLI setup.

It absolutely will not.

 

[Dr. Dro]

It's wishful thinking I'm afraid, at the point we're at, 4090 is already 2x faster than the 2080 Ti, add inefficiencies in the mix, it's just not gonna work. Since Nvidia no longer releases the compatibility bits, it's truly become a Hail Mary situation. The newest card that can do SLI is the 3090/3090 Ti I believe, but by then it had all but been abandoned.

If you want to experience what SLI was at its prime, buy a couple of old Kepler cards, maybe a GTX 690 or even a Titan Z if you find one for an acceptable price, and run games from the 2010-2015 timeframe at most. Newer the game, worse it'll be, promise.

 

[Toothless]

SLI is dead because it was costly to code into games, and single cards were doing just fine. Also why does anyone want to run two 250-400w cards that'll add stuttering, latency, issues?

 

[Tropick]

Run any game with stupid enough settings and your GPU will choke no matter how beefy it is or how many of them you have. Also the super finicky driver support needed for a game to work well with SLI would make it an unattractive option given how spoiled we are with things like VRR. I would rather have a buttery smooth, framerate capped 120FPS with freesync/gsync over a "max throughput" 240FPS that's shot to hell with tearing and microstutter any day.

Also calling the 4090 a "POS card" is a dead giveaway that you haven't actually experienced one before. Those things are godly. A 4090 would roll those SLI 2080Tis up in a joint and smoke them.

 

[Keullo-e]

I remember BF1 being the newest game I've played with a somewhat good multi-GPU support, I had a R9 290 CF back then. But after I switched to a 980 Ti, even with a lower fps, the game felt waaaaay smoother to play.

 

[kilo]

You're getting 2.25x to 2.75x scaling? Can you make a video and post a link? Cause that's pretty good for not being driver supported.

 

[Keullo-e]

You're getting 2.25x to 2.75x scaling? Can you make a video and post a link? Cause that's pretty good for not being driver supported.

Agree. I remember seeing usually something like 50-70% uplift in the BEST scenarios with the few multi-GPU setups I've had. Maybe in synthetics the score ~doubled.

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

I would love to see the proof of Cyberpunk running SLI. The humour is, believe me or not, NVIDIA hadn't let CDPR implement this feature in this game and multi GPU is strictly banned.

 

[phanbuey]

SLI was at it's peak with th 8800 GTs / GTX200 / 400 but by pascal it was obvious that it was never going to stop being a game of whackamole and exponentially increased the difficulty of developing clean drivers. Once cards got fast enough it no longer made sense. You're essentially 4xing the cost of maintaining drivers while also eating into your own sales of your flagship card.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Run any game with stupid enough settings and your GPU will choke no matter how beefy it is or how many of them you have.

Deus EX mankind Divided still can bring a RTX 4090 down its knees, it will get down to 22 or less fps with just one setting.
It's the games MSAAx2 setting.
& that game is from 2016

SLI was at it's peak with th 8800 GTs / GTX200 / 400 but by pascal it was obvious that it was never going to stop being a game of whackamole and exponentially increased the difficulty of developing clean drivers. Once cards got fast enough it no longer made sense. You're essentially 4xing the cost of maintaining drivers while also eating into your own sales of your flagship card.

I don't know how you can come to that conclusion? In 2023 alone more 13 Triple A games released with stuttering or micro-stuttering that only used a single card. The fact that those problems still exist on single card should tell it was never the driver or the cards or even the Cpu for S.L.I/.Crossfire. It's just crappily built game engines look at the half-baked coding we're getting now there so unoptimized you have to use upscaling even at 1080P.

 

[thesmokingman]

Why only dual, might as well go quad haha, double the burn!

 

[phanbuey]

Deus EX mankind Divided still can bring a RTX 4090 down its knees, it will get down to 22 or less fps with just one setting.
It's the games MSAAx2 setting.
& that game is from 2016


I don't know how you can come to that conclusion? In 2023 alone more 13 Triple A games released with stuttering or micro-stuttering that only used a single card. The fact that those problems still exist on single card should tell it was never the driver or the cards or even the Cpu for S.L.I/.Crossfire. It's just crappily built game engines look at the half-baked coding we're getting now there so unoptimized you have to use upscaling even at 1080P.

You're talking about the shader loading stutter -- yes that is a curse and that has nothing to do with sli, and its horrible.

Microstuttering is a bit different - it's the lag / latency between the two cards at very high fps.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

You're talking about the shader loading stutter -- yes that is a curse and that has nothing to do with sli, and its horrible.

Microstuttering is a bit different - it's the lag / latency between the two cards at very high fps.

No, it is not Shader loading. The games I'm talking about don't even have shader loading problems.
Latency like you're talking about can be removed with higher clocks, without the need of increased IPC.
It's the same thing as when an Intel CPU somehow loads a game faster than current AMD ryzen, while still having lower IPC, than Ryzen MCM cpu.

 

[Outback Bronze]

I think the biggest issue apart from games not being supported was Frametimes.

This guy explains it quite well:

And yes, a 4090 will smoke 2080ti SLI

 

[droopyRO]

I only once did the stupid thing to go multiGPU. Back 11-12 years ago, when i got a GTX660 and after a few months later i got a second GTX 660 and a R9 280X. After a few days i returned the 280X, and kept the SLI, one of, if not the dumbest thing i ever made regarding hardware. The 280X had 1GB more of vRAM, higher bus, better cooling and was overall a better card. I ran games for a few more months on the SLI and sold them both. Stutter, games not optimized for multiGPU, and bad frame times were what SLI got me. Never again, except as a retro hobby thing if i ever decide to do it again.

 

[BMfan80]

Maybe you should of watched a video 1st, before spewing nonsense.
A sli 2080ti set up was only 8 fps higher than a 3090. I think it was 67 vs 75.
In Red Dead Redemption 2, Average for the 4090 was 121fps.

He also mentions that the 2080ti's where drawing close to 550watts.

 

[Dragam1337]

I was personally i big advocate of sli for many years - i had sli setups, tri sli setups, and even quad sli setups starting with the the 8000 gtx, and ending with the 1080 ti. And while the 1080 ti's did indeed SMOKE the 2080 ti in everything where sli worked, that list became excruciatingly small over time, and to even get it to work you had to do quite alot of "hacks". Primary reason being that sli and temporal effects really don't go hand in hand... and games are just super dependant on them today. Rdr2 being a prime example - you could get sli to run super fast, but you needed to have TAA disabled, otherwise performance absolutely tanked... so while performance was super fast, the game looked like **** being a massive shimmerfest.

For those reasons i don't ever see sli really making a comeback.

I think the biggest issue apart from games not being supported was Frametimes.

This guy explains it quite well:

And yes, a 4090 will smoke 2080ti SLI

Honestly frametimes became an entirely non-issue with g-sync together with an fps cap.

But prior to gsync, it could be pretty bad, yeah.

Agree. I remember seeing usually something like 50-70% uplift in the BEST scenarios with the few multi-GPU setups I've had. Maybe in synthetics the score ~doubled.

Basically all frostbite based games gave a 97-98% performance uplift with sli, provided that you weren't bottlenecked by anything in your system. But really, alot of games saw very high sli scaling.

Very old post of mine

SLI scaling - is it really only useful in benchmarks ? - Imgur

Run any game with stupid enough settings and your GPU will choke no matter how beefy it is or how many of them you have. Also the super finicky driver support needed for a game to work well with SLI would make it an unattractive option given how spoiled we are with things like VRR. I would rather have a buttery smooth, framerate capped 120FPS with freesync/gsync over a "max throughput" 240FPS that's shot to hell with tearing and microstutter any day.

Also calling the 4090 a "POS card" is a dead giveaway that you haven't actually experienced one before. Those things are godly. A 4090 would roll those SLI 2080Tis up in a joint and smoke them.

You do realize that you could / can run sli with gsync + framecap aswell, right? And yes, that will be buttery smooth aswell.

 

[Deleted member 57642]

Drivers and optimization for SLI combos was always an issue - compared to the raw power of a Single Card.

 

[erocker]

Hard core Gamer delights.

Well, love to see you try it out!

Can't know for sure but with GPU's growing ever larger again and power usage going way up again, AMD/Nvidia/Intel could revisit multiple GPU's. I'm not holding my breath tho.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

I only once did the stupid thing to go multiGPU. Back 11-12 years ago, when i got a GTX660 and after a few months later i got a second GTX 660 and a R9 280X. After a few days i returned the 280X, and kept the SLI, one of, if not the dumbest thing i ever made regarding hardware. The 280X had 1GB more of vRAM, higher bus, better cooling and was overall a better card. I ran games for a few more months on the SLI and sold them both. Stutter, games not optimized for multiGPU, and bad frame times were what SLI got me. Never again, except as a retro hobby thing if i ever decide to do it again.

Wasn't that card made on smaller node though?
Honestly smaller buses seem to help alleviate a lot of other problems for certain series of cards in multi-card setups, unless the card needs more bandwidth. Which is probably what happened with 280X vs GTX 660.

Maybe you should of watched a video 1st, before spewing nonsense.
A sli 2080ti set up was only 8 fps higher than a 3090. I think it was 67 vs 75.
In Red Dead Redemption 2, Average for the 4090 was 121fps.

He also mentions that the 2080ti's where drawing close to 550watts.

That maybe because of way the TAA is used or what every AA/AF they enable, I have done a lot research on TAA & still cannot figure out why developers ever bothered with TAA. It had a lot of inherent problems that other AA/AF techniques don't have.

Being Close to 550 Watts isn't that bad when you consider that the RTX 4090 is node 4x smaller while still needing up to around 450 Watts max, & over clock models push it right back up to 550-600watts.
Also Like said before the smaller single bus is going to help. It's one 384 bit bus vs two 384 bit buses totaling 768 bit, it's a lot for a cpu to handle.

A long time ago back when the HD 5000 series where out & Eyefinity came out Someone did a Tri-fire test with three HD 5670 vs two HD 5870 2Gb's The smaller cards had better loads across them & scaled better in more games than The two cards did. The only time the two cards could out do the three was when the Vram buffer was too small.

My current system is cpu bottlenecked by the low clock speeds of the Ryzen 5800x 3D on my 2080 ti's in S.L.I.
I'm sure If I was running two RTX 2070 super's in S.L.I it would be a better balance.

I can't even move these cards to an AM5 board where I can have cpu clocks & IPC I need because there are no S.L.I AM5 boards. I was hoping to figure out if any of the TRX50 or the WRX90 board have any support like the older TRX40 & WRX80 boards did as they both support Both Workstation NV-link & all S.L.I setups.

I was personally i big advocate of sli for many years - i had sli setups, tri sli setups, and even quad sli setups starting with the the 8000 gtx, and ending with the 1080 ti. And while the 1080 ti's did indeed SMOKE the 2080 ti in everything where sli worked, that list became excruciatingly small over time, and to even get it to work you had to do quite alot of "hacks". Primary reason being that sli and temporal effects really don't go hand in hand... and games are just super dependant on them today. Rdr2 being a prime example - you could get sli to run super fast, but you needed to have TAA disabled, otherwise performance absolutely tanked... so while performance was super fast, the game looked like **** being a massive shimmerfest.

For those reasons i don't ever see sli really making a comeback.



Honestly frametimes became an entirely non-issue with g-sync together with an fps cap.

But prior to gsync, it could be pretty bad, yeah.



Basically all frostbite based games gave a 97-98% performance uplift with sli, provided that you weren't bottlenecked by anything in your system. But really, alot of games saw very high sli scaling.

Very old post of mine

SLI scaling - is it really only useful in benchmarks ? - Imgur



You do realize that you could / can run sli with gsync + framecap aswell, right? And yes, that will be buttery smooth aswell.

I don't like post processing of anything. Matter fact I stopped using AA & AF for now. Just doesn't seem work really. I just usually upscaling everything to 2160P & run it on a 144hz 1080P monitor lol. I can't see no jaggies at all then.
I have about 5 New games that support the newer mGPU & I can tell you right now that mGPU just makes your games cpu bound,. From what I've seen so far. I think everyone, including developers really didn't know how much drivers really were helping out with graphics cards. I mean Even with Intel's ARC, it's quite clear that drivers still have a massive impact on how well a game runs regardless of DX12 or Vulkan being a much lower-level A.P.I.

It feels like DX12 is failure a lot of broken promises in the part as DXR & RTX are always confused by consumers. Only 50% of games have been releasing with any sort or RT features, & Vulkan is just the lone wolf that everyone seems to have forgotten about.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Well, love to see you try it out!

Can't know for sure but with GPU's growing ever larger again and power usage going way up again, AMD/Nvidia/Intel could revisit multiple GPU's. I'm not holding my breath tho.

SLI as we know I don't think will ever happen again but chiplets or 3D stacked compute dies will certainly happen

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Well, love to see you try it out!

Can't know for sure but with GPU's growing ever larger again and power usage going way up again, AMD/Nvidia/Intel could revisit multiple GPU's. I'm not holding my breath tho.

All of AMD's RDNA line up support mGPU.
You lose Rebar when it's Enabled.

 

[erocker]

All of AMD's RDNA line up support mGPU.
You lose Rebar when it's Enabled.

"Support" is a pretty broad term in this case.

 

[Toothless]

All of AMD's RDNA line up support mGPU.
You lose Rebar when it's Enabled.

Yeah no, crossfire/mGPU is still garbage. Only worked in benchmarks like 3DMark when I tested with two 5700XT's.