Does SLI still suck?

[SteveGrabowski0]

I know it was a minefield a few months ago but I haven't paid much attention lately. My brother is having two GTX 1080 delivered to his apartment tomorrow and I'm wondering if I should tell him to leave them unopened so he can return for refund and buy a 1080 Ti. Waiting for Volta isn't an option because his current gpu is an HD 6970.

[Mi26]

Yes for some games

[NelizMastr]

SLI doesn't work in DX12 games, and a lot of games show little to no improvement (sometimes negative scaling). It depends on the games you play. Buy SLI only if you are sure that the games you want to play support it. If not, 1080Ti.

[Damascus]

Worse than before

[Snooli]

Yes, return them. It is getting better in DX9-11 games by the day, but since DX12/Vulkan SLI is on the devs to implement, we can all wave goodbye to multiGPU configs.

[Froody129]

The only time I would recommend SLI is if you already have the top end consumer card available (the 1080ti) and need more performance.

[Daniel Z.]

10 minutes ago, Damascus said:

Worse than before

Remember when the 295x2 had like perfect scaling?

[Damascus]

Just now, Daniel Z. said:

Remember when the 295x2 had like perfect scaling?

Yeah, back when the response to 3 and 4 way so I was "it's not worth it for only 50% or less gpu usage"

[SteveGrabowski0]

Crap even if he did want a 1080 Ti instead, they're going for $1000 USD to $1200 USD on newegg right now. Of course he can't complain since his system was built on ether speculation. 

[Daniel644]

19 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Crap even if he did want a 1080 Ti instead, they're going for $1000 USD to $1200 USD on newegg right now. Of course he can't complain since his system was built on ether speculation. 

run the dual 1080's mining till they pay for themselves, then keep mining and use the profits from the first year to buy whatever is the best Volta Gaming card when those come out. You have better odds of WINNING a 1080ti in a Nvidia giveaway then buying one at regular retail price right now.

[Mathsnerds]

I know I'm adding this a bit late but I thought I would add my opinion.

 

In my experience with the last graphics card I had until recently (ASUS ROG MARS GTX 760x2) SLI sucks most of the time...

 

Oh but when it works, it works pretty well. A great example of a great SLI enabled game is the original Shadow of Mordor. The scaling is aprox 1.75x the performance. But even at that its not quite worth it.

 

Theres some good examples but most seem to be bad or non-developed into games. 

[maizenblue]

Because u now have cards that can handle 140p and 4k themselves, the need for sli has decreased. It was more popular before because thats what u needed to hang at high resolutions. 

[Mick Naughty]

Hasn't sucks for me and ive sli'd ever series since ive started with actual pc's with the 550ti's.

Would still use it if I didn't have to rebuild my main rig to handle the 1080's. Old i7's suck more then what people think sli does.

[Daniel Z.]

7 hours ago, Daniel644 said:

run the dual 1080's mining till they pay for themselves, then keep mining and use the profits from the first year to buy whatever is the best Volta Gaming card when those come out. You have better odds of WINNING a 1080ti in a Nvidia giveaway then buying one at regular retail price right now.

You aren't serious, right? The 1080 isn't cheap and 2 is more than a 1080Ti. Trying to mine back the cost would take forever

[Eduard the weeb]

yeah A single 1080ti is better then 2 1080s in like 90 percent of things

[SteveGrabowski0]

2 hours ago, Mick Naughty said:

Hasn't sucks for me and ive sli'd ever series since ive started with actual pc's with the 550ti's.

Would still use it if I didn't have to rebuild my main rig to handle the 1080's. Old i7's suck more then what people think sli does.

What games did you play when you were running SLI 1080? My brother is planning on running them at 4k with one of the high bandwidth bridges, so the scaling should be better than at 1440p.

[Daniel644]

35 minutes ago, Daniel Z. said:

You aren't serious, right? The 1080 isn't cheap and 2 is more than a 1080Ti. Trying to mine back the cost would take forever

depends where you are and if the 1080's where bought at or very near regular retail (500-550) then they would be about the same as a single WAY OVERPRICED 1080ti (per PCPartPicker the cheapest 1080ti currently available is 1,040) also unless you just have stupid high power costs it would NOT take "forever", you're looking at 4-6 (probably closer to the 6 end of that range) dollars a day per GPU (so 8-12 total for 2) of raw earnings with a dollar of that going to pay for power at the US national average rate for power, thats a PROFIT after power is paid of 210-330 per MONTH, which means 3-4 months of mining would pay off the 2 1080's and the remaining 8 months of mining in the year would bring in more then enough to pay for a new better single GPU when the next gen comes. I personally have earned 240 dollars worth of bitcoin from NiceHash since 11:30 PM Christmas Eve to 5AM today with my 2 1080 ti's.

[Mick Naughty]

1 hour ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

What games did you play when you were running SLI 1080? My brother is planning on running them at 4k with one of the high bandwidth bridges, so the scaling should be better than at 1440p.

Only game I can attempt use a pair of 1080s would be bf1 or ww2 if they have a profile then. Cpu can barley handle one card at 1440 though. So I mainly sli with my older cards at 3k. 

[Bhav]

It sucks even more now, and I've had SLI or Crossfire every gen until now.

 

In reviews for the latest DX12 games, max FPS maybe go up by 10-20% with SLI, but minimum frames go down. I just looked at my previous SLI 980 Ti PC in disappointment and sold it all.

 

The only great thing about SLI is how fancy it looks in a large case, so thats why I swapped to mini ITX now to forever curb the desire of wanting to fill that empty motherboard space with a second GPU.

[SteveGrabowski0]

1 minute ago, Mick Naughty said:

Only game I can attempt use a pair of 1080s would be bf1 or ww2 if they have a profile then. Cpu can barley handle one card at 1440 though. So I mainly sli with my older cards at 3k. 

So how is it still great then? I thought you were going to have a big list of games that benefit a lot from dual 1080.

[Mick Naughty]

2 hours ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

So how is it still great then? I thought you were going to have a big list of games that benefit a lot from dual 1080.

I don’t play many games. I get cod every year and bf games. All of which scale great. I don’t go out of my way to see what games go benefit from two cards. The game isn’t the problem for me as much as it is the cpu. 

[SteveGrabowski0]

Just now, Mick Naughty said:

I don’t play many games. I get cod every year and bf games. All of which scale great. I don’t go out of my way to see what games go benefit from two cards. The game isn’t the problem for me as much as it is the cpu. 

So you're not in a position to tell us how good SLI is then if you only play two games. Because the benchmarks show it has sucked for a while.

[Princess Luna]

13 hours ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

.

While I'd say doing so was better since a single 1080 Ti is not that behind the 1080 SLI, like 10~15fps difference if all rest the same, hopefully he already thought about the need for a better motherboard and psu.

 

The 1080 Ti is better as an all around solution since you might come across games that won't take advantage of it and you'll end up with a 1080 performance.

 

Problem right now is that the prices are so high... like really high... 1080 Ti's are going for over a thousand dollars, to the point might even make sense a TITAN Xp if you're willing to pay this much.

[SteveGrabowski0]

12 hours ago, Daniel644 said:

run the dual 1080's mining till they pay for themselves, then keep mining and use the profits from the first year to buy whatever is the best Volta Gaming card when those come out. You have better odds of WINNING a 1080ti in a Nvidia giveaway then buying one at regular retail price right now.

I just talked to him and he said he bought the dual 1080s for mining while also having something awesome to game on. I would have told him to get dual 1070 Ti if that was his plan though.

[Mick Naughty]

32 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

So you're not in a position to tell us how good SLI is then if you only play two games. Because the benchmarks show it has sucked for a while.

Like I said, have sli’d every gen of cards since 5xx. It sucks if you are dumb enough to get two or more for a game that doesn’t support it. Never once have I had an issue with sli. 

 

Apples to oranges really. It is great. I still use sli everyday so don’t see how it’s not a viable option.