so pre2016
totally passé

not even 5090 has NVlink

In 2020, Nvidia announced that they will no longer be adding new SLI driver profiles on RTX 2000 series and older from January 1, 2021

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink

Originally posted by heime2003:

SLI is no more in GPU market?

It's a fun idea, that people loved to fantasize about but less than 1% of users every actually did it. It's a lot of work to develop for no one to use it.

Originally posted by heime2003:

reason of it mentioned in gpu discussions?

The idea is fun and appealing. It's just not terribly practical. But still people like the magic of the idea.I mean most people won't own a flagship card, but they like to fantasize about them. Why wouldn't you also fantasize about combining two for even more power?

It's basically the IT version of talking about super cars or I suppose in the case of SLI, classic super cars. I mean why do people still pine over the Lamborghini Countach even though it hasn't been made in 35 years? In both cases, gone, but not forgotten.

Sli looked cool and let you achieve (with a whole bunch of work and effort) far better performance at higher res than you could hope to achieve with a single card.

The thing is / was, with the release of the 2080ti, there really was no longer a need for it and support was jumping off a cliff (unreal engine never supported it and a whole load of games started running on it).

You had to patch in support from other games yourself and most games only hit about 50% scaling, plus if your cards weren't perfectly in sync you'd get stutters.

I liked sli, I had sli 980'sthat let me run high refresh 1440p then I continued with watercooled 1080ti's.

When the 2080ti launched I decided to drop sli as the single card was enough, I messed with it again with the 3090 as I was doing some mining and had the cards I figured why not and it really was not a good experience, my messing with it lasted a week.

So, really, the technology killed itself off by becoming powerful enough to not be needed, thst and the decision to restrict it to the top models only, which shut down the sneaky option of using 2 cheaper cards to get better performance for less than 1 high end card thst was often used in the early days.

Only real thing I miss from it, is it looked cool and, was technically still far cheaper buying 2 of those old cards vs 1 3090, 4090, 5090 and in some cases a 2080ti.

sli beyond the 3dfx card are all game dependent
the game needed to support sli for it to work properly

with the voodoo2, it worked with the driver to enable sli, every game that could use dx/ogl/glide would use it if it was available

Sli never worked anyways the framepacing was so bad that it would feel the same as one gpu except a fps tool might show x2 fps that is a flawed metric.FPS means nothing its the frametimes that matter and the 0.01% lows.


Dual gpu now only has two niche purposes


1 lossless scaling framegen on a seperate gpu
2 physx on a seperate gpu

Originally posted by Rod:

Sli never worked anyways the framepacing was so bad that it would feel the same as one gpu except a fps tool might show x2 fps that is a flawed metric.FPS means nothing its the frametimes that matter and the 0.01% lows.


Dual gpu now only has two niche purposes


1 lossless scaling framegen on a seperate gpu
2 physx on a seperate gpu

You could fix the pacing issye by getting both cards locked to the exact same speed, atleast it always worked for me on sli 980's a d 1080ti's.