sli Why is SLI dead?

[Pyrofunto]

Hey guys, I've heard a lot that gaming with 2 grafic cards in SLI is not a good idea anymore.

But why is that? Is it just not worth it beacause the performance boost is not great enough or is it beacause it doesn't work or event down right get things worse?

[Sakkura]

The support for it in games and the driver is poor. Most people only have a single card, so the devs don't devote significant resources to making SLI run well.

 

This lacking support creates a feedback loop; fewer people invest in SLI setups, which then makes it even less worth it for devs to work on SLI optimization.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Game support isn't great, so not that many games get a boost. There is also frametime issues with stutters.

[PlayStation 2]

A lot of newer games simply don't support it like many 7th generation-era games did and single GPUs have gotten powerful enough to the point where a dual GPU setup is all but unnecessary for gaming unless you're pushing a ridiculous pixel count.

[Emanbaird]

Yeah, the amount of users actually investing in it (Me included) and the problems the developers have to overcome in order to make it actually good is not worth it 

[Tristerin]

Yup, comes down to % of people you cater to.  You aren't going to cater to 2% of your consumers, you will cater to the 98%. 

[Pyrofunto]

ok so it is really just because of the support in games, so the technology still works as "well" as before, people just don't take it into account anymore

[Emanbaird]

Also, No _normal person wants to spend $1000+ on a single card, let alone $1000 on multiple cards 

[Enderman]

1) in the 1% of games that support it, scaling isn't 200%, it is more like 150%, so worse value for your money

 

2) in the other 99% of games, it is unsupported and offers 0 improvement

 

3) in some older games, they won't even run unless you disable SLI, so another inconvenience

 

4) double the heat and power consumption

 

5) double the PCIe cables necessary and space taken up inside a case

 

6) some games will have microstuttering and other issues that don't happen with single GPUs

 

7) single GPUs are powerful enough for most people's needs, only a small number of gamers actually need multi-GPU because they're running 5K or 8k or whatever

 

8 ) nvidia is phasing out SLI, most of their GPUs don't have it anymore

[Unhelpful]

7 minutes ago, Enderman said:

1) in the 1% of games that support it, scaling isn't 200%, it is more like 150%, so worse value for your money

That's a funny way to say 130% in 9 of the 10 games that support it and 150% in the last one that does.

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, JoeyDM said:

That's a funny way to say 130% in 9 of the 10 games that support it and 150% in the last one that does.

Gotta be a little optimistic yo

[sgloux3470]

It's not dead.  People don't know what the fuck they are talking about.

 

I got 80-90% scaling on my SLI 980 rig in the vast majority of games that needed the extra GPU power for 4k/60 FPS.  Crossfire has less support and 90-95% scaling.  There are some games that either artifact heavily with SLI or won't utilize it at all and there are a few more of those every year, but you can still play most AAA titles with it.  

 

The key is running the game at higher fidelity/resolution rather than trying to push high FPS.  You will reach CPU limitations if you're using SLI at 1440p with most cards. 

 

 

[Mick Naughty]

Its lazy game makers. Thanks to people talking about shit they don't know, the masses have been turned away from it.

So if people think its bad, why would a company spend the time and money to make it work for their game?

Always works great for me given the game doesn't need $1k processor to play it.

[xg32]

when i had sli, i had to wait for drivers that supports it, then even then chances for stutters are high. Most multiplayer games don't need the extra horsepower, that said for 4k 144hz, there's no other choice atm, but there's the bandwidth issues on the monitors so far anyway.

 

i rather play in windowed 1440p/98 for games that don't run 4k/98 over running sli. For example

 

1 2080 ti is enough for RE2 remake in 4k/98, why bother with SLI when devs don't wanna support it.

[Fasauceome]

5 minutes ago, sgloux3470 said:

The key is running the game at higher fidelity/resolution rather than trying to push high FPS

I was once planning on running dual GTX 970s for max details 1080p before upgrading to a 1070. Would this have yielded a tangible performance increase in most games?

[L S D]

Honestly, SLI is overrated however there are benifits

[L S D]

I mean if you have the money, want out of this world resolution, and wouldn't mind overclocking I won't stop you

[Kalm_Traveler]

2 hours ago, Pyrofunto said:

Hey guys, I've heard a lot that gaming with 2 grafic cards in SLI is not a good idea anymore.

But why is that? Is it just not worth it beacause the performance boost is not great enough or is it beacause it doesn't work or event down right get things worse?

it isn't dead - it's pretty much been in the same boat for the last 3-5 years. 

 

If you do some research, roughly 60-70% of games work with it (hint: you can make your own SLI profile even if your favorite new game doesn't already have one - ala Battlefield V).

 

Of the games that work with it, there is a wide variance of scale - some games scale extremely well, some only see maybe a 10-15% performance improvement. That is hard to swallow for budget-minded gamers.

 

The other consideration is that so far, games that run in DX12 mode have not been coded to work with multiple graphics cards even though DX12 has explicit multi-graphics card built in. To play with SLI active you need to be able to run the games in DX11 mode for now - which can end up as a net negative in performance since many developers are focused on learning and implementing DX12 improvements, and not paying much if any attention to DX11.

 

Lastly - keep in mind that there are far more gamers who can't afford two high-end cards than those who can (or at least who can justify the cost), so the majority of opinions will be from people who literally can't afford it, have no recent experience with it, etc and are just jumping on the hate-train bandwagon. For those of us who can, we tend to give pretty honest feedback. 

 

I would sum it up like this as far as whether or not 'you' should consider SLI in 2019:

 

1. Do you need moar fps and already have 1 of the best card on the market? (we'll settle for 2080 Ti since the Titan RTX's gain over it is negligible and it cost 200% as much)
2. Is the rest of your setup already as good as it can be without 2 graphics cards? (IE - your monitor has a high enough refresh rate to benefit from being fed more FPS? Are you using a beefy enough CPU that it isn't the bottleneck?)
3. Do the games you play / want to play scale well with SLI, or if there is no default SLI profile yet are you willing to create one/ follow guides online to create one?
4. is spending double for graphics cards worth having higher FPS to you?

 

If you answer yes to all 4 of those, sure go for it. Remember none of us can tell you what is 'worth it' to you - only you can decide that for yourself.

[Kalm_Traveler]

2 hours ago, Enderman said:

1) in the 1% of games that support it, scaling isn't 200%, it is more like 150%, so worse value for your money

Approximately 60-70% of modern games scale positively with SLI compared to 1 of any given card - and if you're considering 2 top end cards you're not a value-based AMD customer in the first place

2) in the other 99% of games, it is unsupported and offers 0 improvement

It's true that 30-40% of games don't work at all or not well with SLI enabled, definitely not anywhere near 99%

3) in some older games, they won't even run unless you disable SLI, so another inconvenience

This literally is the same as your last point

4) double the heat and power consumption

If it's not scaling 200% it isn't using 200% power, and thus not generating 200% heat. It's true that 2 of something will use more power than 1. Math is hard.

5) double the PCIe cables necessary and space taken up inside a case

Hello Captain Obvious, 2 things take up more space than 1 thing, that is correct and unrelated to the state of SLI support

6) some games will have microstuttering and other issues that don't happen with single GPUs

100% true - finally a worthwhile data point

7) single GPUs are powerful enough for most people's needs, only a small number of gamers actually need multi-GPU because they're running 5K or 8k or whatever

This irrelevant - you are not 'most people', you are you. If you're considering SLI in the first place, it is quite likely because your 'needs' seem like it might be a solution

8 ) nvidia is phasing out SLI, most of their GPUs don't have it anymore

Totally false - they are not phasing anything out and the same product lines have had it for many generations. The only odd exception is the Titan V which wasn't based on a mainstream product line. Turing, Pascal, etc all have SLI support on the Titan, 80 series and 70 series product lines.

Your post is almost entirely wrong. Please don't waste everyone's time posting misinformation.

 

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Two things I wanted to add in the pot:

• VRAM does not combine in SLI or Crossfire. While I don't think this is much of an issue with later cards sporting more VRAM than they know what to do with, for older cards, a single card with more VRAM can lend itself to better performance than two cards with less. This was the case when I moved from two GTX 560 Tis to a GTX 670. Maximum performance was about the same, but 99th percentile performance massively improved.
  • This is restriction is supposedly gone with DX12/Vulkan multi-video card rendering, but I've yet to see anything of it.
• You're getting "next-gen" performance with current gen features. The setup may last you for years, but you may be missing out on features that newer cards get. I'm sure two GTX 780 Tis perform really well, but they're also missing out on some features or benefits that were introduced in the GeForce 10 series.

[jasonvp]

30 minutes ago, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

Your post is almost entirely wrong. Please don't waste everyone's time posting misinformation.

I honestly wish people would stop posting about SLI when they haven't got a single clue about it.  It's so misleading and does nothing but continue the spread of mis-information on the topic.

[Enderman]

2 hours ago, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

Your post is almost entirely wrong. Please don't waste everyone's time posting misinformation.

 

 

1) lol 60-70%  of games?? Where did you get that number...

I don't think you realize how many hundreds of thousands of games exist in the world, and 99% of them are not triple A games from EA or ubisoft or whatever, and do not support multi-GPU.

 

2) Again you have no idea about how many games exist outside your little world of CoD and tomb raider and whatever.

 

3) No, some games will simply not use the second card, while other games will simply not run at all until it is manually disabled. Not the same thing.

Having to go into GPU control panel every time you want to play an older game and need to disable and re-enable SLI is a pain and an inconvenience.

 

4) Again you seem to not understand how multi-GPU works. Having two cards will use twice the power and produce twice the heat, regardless if it is scaling 125% or 200%.

You will see both GPUs at 100% usage if multi-GPU is working (obviously not if you disable one card)

The scaling % depends on the game itself.

 

5) Two things take up more space than one thing, and when those two things can be replaced by a single better thing then they are just wasting space.

 

6) 

 

7) A lot of people who considered SLI in the past were low budget gamers looking to add a second older GPU to their config for better performance, not top of the line $5000+ PC build gamers. Those people with $5000+ PCs are definitely less than 1% of gamers, probably less than 0.01% if you look at the statistics of what hardware people own. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

 

8 ) again you have no idea what you're talking about.

In case you have issues with pattern recognition, the image above clearly shows that SLI is being slowly phased out.

 

Next time maybe do a bit of research before trying to correct someone and claim they are wrong  it will be less embarrassing for you

 

[i_build_nanosuits]

 

1 hour ago, Enderman said:

 

 

 

 

3 hours ago, Kalm_Traveler1 said:

Approximately 60-70% of modern games scale positively with SLI compared to 1 of any given card

If that was the case Nvidia wouldn't be slowly killing SLI and a lot more people would buy a second card, me included

[Zberg]

I could see them dropping support for it so people buy new cards. 

 

I don't buy much used.  I prefer a new flagship model or something close to it when I have the choice.  However with the new crazy prices on the RTX cards, SLI on my 970 was the natural choice (for now).  Got a great deal on an identical mint 970 ssc acx EVGA for a little under $100 on ebay.  I'm getting a 60% FPS increase in the games I normally play.  I'm easily keeping 144 fps on 1080p and usually overshooting that by a good bit (160-180) and could clearly use this as an upgrade to 1440p while I wait for the RTX cards to come down in price.  Otherwise I would have jumped right to the 2080 or 2080ti.

 

And because I didn't do that and was able to get a cheap used SLI (that won't benefit NVIDIA), and i'll actually buy their flagship at a lower price at some point, they just lost money on the deal.  If SLI wasn't supported it would have been money in their pocket.

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, Zberg said:

 

Alternatively you could have sold your 970 for $100, combined with the $100 you spent on a second 970, and just bought a used 1070 which would also give you that performance increase but in all games, not just some.

Plus all the newer features and optimizations that came with the 1000 series GPUs.

Plus higher resale value in the future.