NVLink working for Blizzard games?

[Deuteronomy93]

Hi All

 

Randomly saw some videos pop up about NVLink after I looked at support for my Rift and how people were getting amazing performance in games that I thought no longer supported multiple GPUs.

 

Aside from a little bit of VR, I mostly play Blizzard games as I don't have as much time to just venture to others currently:

• Overwatch
• Hearthstone (obviously this one isn't important!)
• WoW (I believe this is actually supported and confirmed on the site)
• HOTS

My understanding was that SLI/Crossfire no longer worked in pretty much any game apart from Wow, APEX and a smattering of others where devs were putting the time in. I know when people talk about SLI they often just refer to NVLink as SLI out of habit but if you just type "Overwatch NVLink" into Youtube there are various hits with people showing supposedly much greater Overwatch performance, even some benchmarks with 2080TIx2 vs Titansx2, though i believe I read that it wasn't supported.

 

Does anyone know if/have any experience with this and how supported NVLink is? If it's something that will still see reasonable gains (I'm not expecting double performance etc) then for my last PC for a long time, I'd like to go with it.

 

Many thanks!

[Princess Luna]

4 minutes ago, Deuteronomy93 said:

I know when people talk about SLI they often just refer to NVLink as SLI out of habit

That is incorrect, RTX cards still uses SLI technology the only thing that has changed is that nVidia has standardize the connectors to the NVLink ones to cheap up on the production line.

 

NVLink is still a Quadro only technology that offers a lot more functionality than the SLI protocol found on GTX and RTX cards do.

[Deuteronomy93]

43 minutes ago, Princess Luna said:

That is incorrect, RTX cards still uses SLI technology the only thing that has changed is that nVidia has standardize the connectors to the NVLink ones to cheap up on the production line.

 

NVLink is still a Quadro only technology that offers a lot more functionality than the SLI protocol found on GTX and RTX cards do.

Sure, but when they moved to the NVLink connections, it wasn't just the old SLI, the bandwidth was also increased.

 

I was meaning that when you search or just browse, there are a lot of people still referring back to SLI when they're using NVLink bridges. I'm not sure if this is still SLI or just a consumer version NVLink.

 

Regardless, can anyone confirm their experience of using multiple GPUs in games such as Overwatch with 2000 series?

[Princess Luna]

2 minutes ago, Deuteronomy93 said:

I was meaning that when you search or just browse, there are a lot of people still referring back to SLI when they're using NVLink bridges.

Because they are still using SLI.

Overwatch has a mediocre SLI support which makes no sense in my opinion because even mid range cards like a RTX 2060 Super if you go low settings you'll likely hit a CPU bound scenario before you need more GPU.

[LukeSavenije]

6 minutes ago, Deuteronomy93 said:

Sure, but when they moved to the NVLink connections, it wasn't just the old SLI, the bandwidth was also increased.

if we're really going on a precise thing here, it's the NVLink (decreased) connector, but still the SLI protocol, hence many referring to it as SLI over NVLink or simply SLI.

 

so the scaling won't be different regardless 

[Deuteronomy93]

Ok, we're talking about performance at the high end. I can easily hit 300fps with an existing setup, we all know that getting high FPS in competitive shooters is easy as they aren't as demanding. That's because it's well documented and has a large user base to gather results from. This isn't the case with 2080ti x2 in games.

 

I'm looking for answers regarding, less well documented cases such as the above.

[Deuteronomy93]

2 minutes ago, LukeSavenije said:

if we're really going on a precise thing here, it's the NVLink (decreased) connector, but still the SLI protocol, hence many referring to it as SLI over NVLink or simply SLI.

 

so the scaling won't be different regardless 

I know that scaling won't be much different even with the bandwidth increase but that's if the support is there in the first place.

 

Just to re-iterate, I'm seeing performance gains for multi-GPU setups in games that I understood to not support it, SLI 1000 series and prior, NVLink 2000 series, Crossfire. I want to determine whether there are actually more games supporting increases than we realised.

 

I can't believe that it would be anything like just a card handling PhysX, i didn't see anything but SLI/NVLink in the videos or their details to suggest otherwise.

[LukeSavenije]

3 minutes ago, Deuteronomy93 said:

I'm looking for answers regarding, less well documented cases such as the above.

again, with these kinds of games you're more likely to be CPU bound in the first place, so it would make more sense to just have a single card

 

and as said by @Princess Luna, it's scaling is mediocre, meaning you're likely better off with a single stronger card rather than two weaker ones, something that happens in a lot of games

[LukeSavenije]

1 minute ago, Deuteronomy93 said:

Just to re-iterate, I'm seeing performance gains for multi-GPU setups in games that I understood to not support it, SLI 1000 series and prior, NVLink 2000 series, Crossfire. I want to determine whether there are actually more games supporting increases than we realised.

there's a difference between poorly and not at all

 

overwatch supports it, but it doesn't scale too well

[Deuteronomy93]

21 hours ago, LukeSavenije said:

there's a difference between poorly and not at all

 

overwatch supports it, but it doesn't scale too well

Can you show where you're seeing this information? I'm seeing various sources say that it scales extremely well with multi GPU setups.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=overwatch+sli+2080ti