SLI doesn't make sense anymore

[SS451]

The title says it all. I see this almost conspiracy theory that Nvidia stopped SLI development because they are greedy and don't want you buying 2 of their GPUs to get more performance. Here is the thing, with higher resolutions and frame rates the scalability of the scalable link interface wasn't there. The latency was to high and it would cost way to much to develop and implement a bridge on the card itself, or they would have to make the cards handle worse to handle lower resolutions and frame rates. O

 

So we would have a situation where the GPUs were handicapped to encourage you to buy 2 of them, where they had expensive PCIE connectors that had no use unless you again bought 2 of them, how is this pro consumer ? 

 

Also the main thing that killed it was software support,  developers just didn't support it as much with many games running worse with SLI. The other factor was VRAM becoming more important in games and the fact that with SLI you only have the VRAM of one card, instead of spending 500 dollars each on two 6 gig cards why not spend a thousand on a 12 gig card ? 

 

It's the equivalent of complain that the industry moved away from multi CPU motherboards

[RONOTHAN##]

17 minutes ago, SS451 said:

I see this almost conspiracy theory that Nvidia stopped SLI development because they are greedy and don't want you buying 2 of their GPUs to get more performance.

Can you send a link to that? SLI has only really been supported on their higher end cards excluding really old stuff like Fermi, and I highly doubt Nvidia is against some whale buying 4 1080 Tis, for instance. 

 

 

You're phrasing most of this like it's a hot take, yet this is about the coldest take I've seen you post. 

[Blue4130]

23 minutes ago, SS451 said:

The title says it all. I see this almost conspiracy theory that Nvidia stopped SLI development because they are greedy and don't want you buying 2 of their GPUs to get more performance. Here is the thing, with higher resolutions and frame rates the scalability of the scalable link interface wasn't there. The latency was to high and it would cost way to much to develop and implement a bridge on the card itself, or they would have to make the cards handle worse to handle lower resolutions and frame rates. O

 

So we would have a situation where the GPUs were handicapped to encourage you to buy 2 of them, where they had expensive PCIE connectors that had no use unless you again bought 2 of them, how is this pro consumer ? 

 

Also the main thing that killed it was software support,  developers just didn't support it as much with many games running worse with SLI. The other factor was VRAM becoming more important in games and the fact that with SLI you only have the VRAM of one card, instead of spending 500 dollars each on two 6 gig cards why not spend a thousand on a 12 gig card ? 

 

It's the equivalent of complain that the industry moved away from multi CPU motherboards

Where have you been for the past nearly ten years? SLI has been dead for a long time. This post it off the mark for you.

[Avocado Diaboli]

35 minutes ago, SS451 said:

Nvidia stopped SLI development because they are greedy

35 minutes ago, SS451 said:

[Nvidia] don't want you buying 2 of their GPUs to get more performance

36 minutes ago, SS451 said:

GPUs were handicapped to encourage you to buy 2 of them

Make it make sense.

 

This entire post reeks of someone trying really hard to come up with a contentious discussion topic, but forgetting that for that to work, you shouldn't present all contradicting opinions on it in your original post simultaneously.

[Eigenvektor]

SLI never made sense

[FliP0x]

If SLI would allow you to double your VRAM, it maybe would have made sense.

[Eigenvektor]

42 minutes ago, FliP0x said:

If SLI would allow you to double your VRAM, it maybe would have made sense.

Only for use cases where latency doesn't matter, i.e. not gaming

[Needfuldoer]

[ Moved to Graphics Cards ]

 

SLI hasn't made sense for gamers in over a decade. Nvidia hasn't even supported SLI on most consumer-grade cards in five years.

 

NVLink on the 3090 and professional cards is mostly there as a high-speed bus to pool resources (mostly VRAM) for GPGPU workloads directly, without involving the motherboard, chipset, and CPU.

[xAcid9]

Stop using Internet Explorer.

[Salted Spinach]

Water is wet

[Spring1898]

Never really did

[SS451]

9 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Can you send a link to that? SLI has only really been supported on their higher end cards excluding really old stuff like Fermi, and I highly doubt Nvidia is against some whale buying 4 1080 Tis, for instance. 

 

also the comments are echoing the sentiment even more then the video

Quote

Lots of people were buying gtx 970s and getting great performance. Nvidia didn’t want others buying used gpus cheap and not buying newer cards.

Quote

SLI truly died because of money... You said it "It was becoming more a budget option". They wanted people to get off the older GPUs and spend more money for the newer stuff. The longer they kept SLI alive, the longer people would want to stay on their older GPUs. I think AMD threw a wrench into their plans when they made FSR and Upscaling for everyone. hahaha

Quote

Cutting the BS Nvidia wants you to buy high end GPU and not a old one that they won't profit off off

 

[Echothedolpin]

19 hours ago, SS451 said:

also the comments are echoing the sentiment even more then the video

 

I’m guessing non of those commenters were working with PCs during the time SLI was in its prime.

 

I worked repair and refurbishment during the time SLI was in its heyday and flagship cards were a fraction of the price they are today. Only ever saw an extremely bare handful of systems with SLI that weren’t with top end flagship cards. It was well understood/tested that a single top of the line card was almost universally better than any midrange or lower high end sli setup in MOST games and circumstances.

 

SLI didn’t make sense years before support ended and is was well supported for a long time.

 

 

[gravitywave]

One of the features I like looking for on motherboards is the ability to bifurcate cpu lanes on the top pair of x16 slots. Generally this can be easily identified by a "SLI ready" logo, and I still see that on modern boards, so that's good. I'm just hoping with the death of SLI they don't start dropping that feature altogether from motherboards. There are other use cases out there besides gaming.

[SS451]

5 hours ago, gravitywave said:

One of the features I like looking for on motherboards is the ability to bifurcate cpu lanes on the top pair of x16 slots. Generally this can be easily identified by a "SLI ready" logo, and I still see that on modern boards, so that's good. I'm just hoping with the death of SLI they don't start dropping that feature altogether from motherboards. There are other use cases out there besides gaming.

Multi GPU does make sense in GPGPU where the workloads are more planned and resources can be better allocated, In gaming though Rendering in real-time requires low latency and seamless synchronization between frames, which is challenging when using multiple GPUs. Issues such as frame pacing, micro stuttering, and the complexities of splitting and distributing rendering tasks across GPUs can make the game feel jank.