Two GPUs without SLI... useful???

[Hi P]

I currently own a RTX 2080 Ti, if I were to buy a second GPU, say for example an RTX 4080 or something like that

 

Does it somehow make sense to have both GPUs without SLI?

 

Any usefulness?

[bmx6454]

for gaming? no, wouldn't be useful these days even if it were two of the same cards sli'ed. for certain productivity tasks it could be useful.

[tkitch]

for mining?  Yes.
For some very niche workloads that can work across 2 GPUs?  Yes.

For normal people at home?  Not so much.

[RONOTHAN##]

For just a gaming system, no. 

 

For a streaming setup, a little, you could have NVENC running on the 2080 Ti and the game running on the 4080, but it's not really that useful, the encoder takes up very little performance, and even if you did want to do this you would be better off selling the 2080 Ti, getting a 1660 Super, and pocketing the difference since they have the same encoder.

 

For a production system, maybe. It's very software dependent, but there are programs out there that can do renders across 2+ different non-matching GPUs with pretty good scaling. There's also VFIO, so if you do a ton of virtualization it would be useful to have the 2080 Ti to pass through to a VM. 

[Sjaakie]

Depends on the workload. Rendering / training AI models may make use of a multi gpu setup.

 

But for gaming without SLI it has zero use.

[rcmaehl]

Do you have one of the following:

• A game that supports DirectX12 mGPU
• A VM
• A crypto wallet
• A youtube/twitch/etc account that you stream to while playing games

 

Otherwise, no

[Sjaakie]

5 replies in 1 minute has to be some sort of record lol

[Middcore]

Selling your current card to offset the price of the 4000 series makes more sense than any of the fringe uses for having both cards, especially considering the power supply you'd need to run both.

[Error 52]

26 minutes ago, Sjaakie said:

Depends on the workload. Rendering / training AI models may make use of a multi gpu setup.

 

But for gaming without SLI it has zero use.

Hell, gaming with SLI has zero use these days.

[emosun]

1 hour ago, bmx6454 said:

wouldn't be useful these days even if it were two of the same cards sli'ed

this wouldnt be correct as every sli game that had a profile created for it has not currently been deleted from planet earth so there would be only about 160+ titles from the past 20 years or so since sli was introduced.

[emosun]

36 minutes ago, Error 52 said:

Hell, gaming with SLI has zero use these days.

this again would be an incorrect statement unless the entire world had managed to remove all previous versions of all software and hardware prior to the statement being made. If you dislike that i'm pointing this out then i'd recommend not speaking in absolutes in the future.

[bmx6454]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

this wouldnt be correct as every sli game that had a profile created for it has not currently been deleted from planet earth so there would be only about 160+ titles from the past 20 years or so since sli was introduced.

i was implying modern games, but sure lol, have a cookie. he also specifically asked about not having them in sli, so doesn't really matter.

[emosun]

5 minutes ago, bmx6454 said:

 he also specifically asked about not having them in sli

thats why i didnt quote them.

1 hour ago, bmx6454 said:

even if it were two of the same cards sli'ed

 

[bmx6454]

5 minutes ago, emosun said:

thats why i didnt quote them.

 

cool lol

[Alex Atkin UK]

19 minutes ago, emosun said:

this wouldnt be correct as every sli game that had a profile created for it has not currently been deleted from planet earth so there would be only about 160+ titles from the past 20 years or so since sli was introduced.

Depends how you classify "benefit".  You'd also be running those games with a much newer GPU, so would there be any actual perceived benefit from using two of them vs one?  There's only so many frames you actually need and a huge ton of drawbacks from using SLI, not least the power consumption and consistency of frame times.

[emosun]

22 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Depends how you classify "benefit".

Benefit as in a single one of the two gpus would render the app slower than two. 

[Mick Naughty]

Weird how the op clearly said without sli and the linus parrots come flying in saying how its dead. 
We get it, you've never used sli before and even if you did, you didnt know what you were doing. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

5 hours ago, emosun said:

Benefit as in a single one of the two gpus would render the app slower than two. 

Its well reported that even with games that supported SLI they would regularly have frame-pacing issues.  Its not all about how many frames you can push, if they're not consistent then its a crap experience.

 

I got the feeling people were more tolerant of that back in the day, I certainly know I was as even with a single card a consistent frame rate was much harder than it is today, the whole pipeline just works a lot better now IMO.

[emosun]

4 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Its well reported that even with games that supported SLI they would sometimes have frame-pacing issues.

there fixed your comment. not sure why people are still typing in absolutes but the linus parrot theory is pretty sound. I get the feeling the only people that speak this way either are just repeating what they've heard or literally dont own any sli hardware from the past 20 years to actually try out.