Is SLI dead?

[Niz0909]

So I decided to build a PC and I selected z590 gaming plus.when I was looking it's specs I find out that it doesn't support SLI.Is SLI necessary in 2022?

[Middcore]

Dead and buried, has been for a while. 

[Zodiark1593]

It’s pushing up flowers right about now. 

[BondiBlue]

SLI hasn't been relevant for many years now. It's quite uncommon to see a build that still uses it these days. 

[Theguywhobea]

SLI is no good no more. I have a Aorus laptop with 2 970m's in SLI and games unironically run better when I have it set to only use one.

[Error 52]

Nvidia stopped providing SLI drivers in 2020, instead pushing the weight down to developers who have to specifically support it. Unsurprisingly, almost nobody bothered. The only 3000 series card to support it is the 3090, I believe. And if you have a 3090, you are going to be doing just fine for GPU performance regardless.

[Zando_]

SLI is dead for gaming. Nvidia only supports it on the highest end SKUs now, and I believe it's only actually used by anyone for world record benchmark attempts. 

[Jackson]

Sadly yes. SLI had amazing potential, but to make it scale well required additional development time that most didn't invest in. I think developers found that since SLI was such a niche group of users that overall, it wasn't worth taking that time and cost to do. Nvidia themselves have all but killed it with the 3000 series. 

[Mick Naughty]

Depends on the use and the hardware. If its anything new, it wont be worth the effort all the time. 

[5b7z]

Obviously SLI is not supported on newer games, but i tried to play a few AAA titles from around 2015 with 2x and 3x 1080 Ti cards and nothing worked better in SLI than without. And those were games with official support and drivers written for it. I'm no expert but i tried hard and it did not work for me.

[BetteBalterZen]

Even when SLI was in it high time, SLI still caused many issues. To be honest, after seeing what SLI was when it was best, and after being a SLI user myself, I'm glad that it has died out and also, graphics cards today are so strong that using 2 for gaming does not make much sense anymore. 

[Samoyed]

Im guessing Crossfire is dead too?

 

[BondiBlue]

4 minutes ago, Samoyed said:

Im guessing Crossfire is dead too?

Yes, pretty much. 

[Middcore]

Crossfire wasn't killed off as deliberately by AMD as SLI was by Nvidia (removing the physical SLI bridge connectors on all but the flagship cards among other things), but yes it's still effectively dead. The last game I can think of that supported it well was Strange Brigade of all things, a quickly-forgotten "AA" title from 2018. DirectX12 and Vulkan in theory made using multiple GPU's, and even multiple GPU's that weren't identical, more effective potentially but it left the burden even more on game developers to code games to take advantage of it, and the share of gamers who actually have more than one card is just so small (and getting smaller all the time) that it wasn't worth the effort.