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Nvidia quietly announce the death of SLI

Associate
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https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/145585-nvidia-create-sli-driver-profiles-jan-2021/

"Nvidia: we won't create any SLI driver profiles after Jan 2021"

"the GeForce RTX 3090, will only be supported in SLI mode when the specific game/app natively implements it."

Seems a bit of sharp practice when these cards cost so much money and are the only one to support SLI not to forewarn customers it probably isn't going to work with most games out there in the future.
 
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It's likely that sli benefit is diminished a lot now with current cards and resolutions due to data rate and distance travel for signal, so leaving it to the top end card for limited use purposes seems plausible.

Let's be honest, SLI has been more and more of a niche thing for a long time. Where you do see multiple cards fitted is normally rendering or kudos factor
 
Soldato
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I was SLI for the following GPU's
Voodoo 2
7800GTX
8800gtx
GTX 275
GTX 580
GTX 780ti

But i changed to using only a Single GPU when i went to the 10 series (GTX 1080) & 20 Series (RTX 2080ti)
Am glad only use a single GPU these days with the crazy Prices of GPUs these days ;)

One flagship GPU costs far more now then what i used to pay for 2 flagship GPU's :mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
 
Soldato
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27 Jul 2004
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Yancashire
670 SLI
780Ti SLI
980Ti SLI

Then 1080Ti single.

I enjoyed SLI in a weird masochistic tinkering kind of way. Used to oddly enjoy trying to mitigate microstutter (if it cropped up - fairly rare) and trying weird Nvidia Inspector tweaks!
I have to say up until the end of my 980Ti run when lack of support really started to kick in, I enjoyed it and most games I played ran and scaled really well, making it well worth it for me at the time.

Don't miss the extra heat issues though, and a Gsync ultrawide panel and the 1080Ti changed everything for me. As someone a bit obsessed with ultimate smoothness and no stutter/ judder I still think Gsync is the best and most underrated technology for gaming in a long time.

RIP SLI :(
 
Last edited:
Man of Honour
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Not all the SLI setups I have run but the ones I had for more than a month in my main gaming PC(s):

7950GX2
8800GT SLI
GTX470 SLI

I stopped after the 470s as even then it was apparent, even with good knowledge of how to tweak with nvidia inspector, etc. that more complex use of newer rendering techniques and APIs was increasingly going to break compatibility with SLI/CF.

Ultimately if they can persuade game developers to program for multi-adaptor from the ground up that is a much better implementation and better supported in DX12 and Vulkan - previously a game developer couldn't program for SLI/CF all they could do was try and avoid breaking compatibility with it - a basic game could run with 100% SLI support and 100% SLI scaling without the game developer putting a single line of code in their game for SLI - but as soon as you started making use of more advanced features you'd have to start thinking about where data was in (video) memory, etc. if you wanted to keep SLI functioning effectively and in some cases with the level the rendering APIs work at you'd have no idea and just have to experiment if you cared about multi-GPU.

I expect nVidia see this as a better time to put those developers on to looking at MCM related developments, etc. instead of trying to keep SLI alive.
 
Soldato
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London
I’m still tempted to mess with a pair of 3090s as a bit of a last SLI hoorah... It doesn’t change that much in my eyes, the better games support it natively anyway.
 

GAC

GAC

Soldato
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11 Dec 2004
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I was SLI for the following GPU's
Voodoo 2

it died there for me, the only true sli setup that actually gave you 2 times the performance as far as i can remember, and then nvidia bought the technology and killed it. the first of many :/
 
Man of Honour
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90,820
I used to love the look of having 2 GPU's in SLI :D

My computer now looks so bare and empty with only one GPU in it :(:(, Like there something missing

Yeah :( I dunno why but I prefer the look of 2x GPUs as well.

it died there for me, the only true sli setup that actually gave you 2 times the performance as far as i can remember, and then nvidia bought the technology and killed it. the first of many :/

SLI worked differently with the Voodoos - a large part of the performance hit was just filling the screen with pixels and games didn't have shaders, etc. so you didn't have problems with requiring data that might be on the other GPU to the one that needed it. SLI then was mostly about spreading the load of putting pixels on the screen so scaling was easier.
 
Soldato
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Stoke-on-Trent
Intel Xe is already MCM design, AMD and Nvidia are doing the same with RDNA 3 and Hopper. Nvidia officially killing SLI is a first step to redirecting theirs and game developer's brainspaces towards coding for multiple lumps o' GPU. There has to be some level of conceptual similarity between making multiple discrete cards work together and multiple GPU chiplets (for lack of a better term) work together so who knows, maybe we'll see the chaining of multiple GPUs come back in the future.
 
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