sli Why is SLI dead?

[Zberg]

Just now, Enderman 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.

Kinda true, but last I had looked up the 970 SLI slightly edged out or was right on with the 1070 in terms of FPS in most games, and that saves me from having to make an ebay listing, wait for it to sell, and deal with shipping it.  Also the condition plus price point (most 970's are in the 120-140 range) made it an even better deal.  

[Kalm_Traveler]

11 hours ago, Enderman said:

-snip-

 

Given the legitimate concerns with SLI support / benefit in games (especially if one plays some of your thousands of homebrew/indie titles that won't run if SLI is enabled), I always recommend that people start off with 1 of the best card that exists first. 

 

If you have the best single card on the market, you'll likely be able to have a very good gaming experience. If you feel that your FPS still isn't high enough, you can continue on down my list of considerations and ultimately decide if SLI is for you or not.

 

Point is, it is not dead, not really dying (remember Nvidia is a business, and their primary business is extracting money from consumers - if you buy two 2080 Ti's and an overpriced NVLink bridge, they just made a lot more money off of you than if you only buy a used 1070). 

 

Another point that many of you guys on the hate train seem to have missed is that SLI support in games is not really the developer's affair - they can code their games in a way to not break with SLI, but the default SLI profiles for games are created and put into driver updates by Nvidia themselves. You can use tools like Nvidia Inspector to create your own profiles if you want to try adding SLI to a game that doesn't already have a profile - though you may need to do some trial and error to figure out which settings work the best.

[sgloux3470]

10 hours ago, fasauceome said:

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?

 

 

Assuming you did so in 2014 when the card launched you would have 1070 level performance for nearly 2 years before the 1070 came out.  (Or just shy of a year before the 980Ti came out for the same cost as 2x 970's) Performance is close but 970 SLI does edge out the 1070 slightly, however the one caveat is that the 970 had gimped VRAM which would mean that in some titles you might not be able to use as high of texture quality settings.

 

As far as 2014/2015 era SLI support things were good.  Dragon age Inquisition, Shadow of mordor, Alien Isolation, Advanced Warfare, The Evil Within, Far Cry 4, Watch Dogs, Assassins Creed Unity, Thief, Titanfall, Lords of the Fallen, Witcher 3, MGSV Phantom Pain, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Evolve, Assassins Creed Syndicate, Battlefield Hardline, Just Cause 3, Rainbow Six Siege, Dying Light, Battlefront, Fallout 4 and Black Ops 3 is a quick list of AAA titles that supported SLI at the time. 

A few notable games that do not support SLI from that time period are Batman Arkham Knight and Wolfenstein New Order.   Some of those games required external tweaking to work but most of them from my memory worked out of the box just fine.

 

That is a pretty comprehensive list of AAA graphically demanding titles from 2014/2015.  At 1080p I would suspect most of those titles would run just fine on a single 970.  At the time I would have recommended 970 SLI for a 1440p target.

 

 

Many of those games would have benefitted significantly from the extra performance from SLI.  And obviously 1070 level performance is still excellent for 1080p even in games today so you could have still been using the same setup and playing most AAA games now just over 4 years later.

 

5 hours ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

 

 

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

 

 

Nvidia is killing SLI because they want to jack up prices.  SLI constrained them - the 980 Ti could not be $800 because 970 SLI would get the same performance for much cheaper. When they removed SLI from the 1060 they could suddenly jack up the price of the 1080 to $699 when you could have theoretically bought 2x 1060's for $400-$500 and beaten it by ~10%.

 

And they did the same with Turing: instead of being able to spend ~$1200 for 2x 2070's to handily beat the 2080Ti your only option is spend the same money on a 2080Ti. 1080 SLI beats the 2080ti and 2070 SLI would have done better.

 

Also worth noting that SLI gains double the benefit of overclocking for obvious reasons.