GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 3-Way and 4-Way SLI will only work on select applications

[thekeemo]

Quote

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Before going to press with this story I asked NVIDIA for comment directly: when was the community finally going to get the Enthusiast Key website to unlock 3-Way and 4-Way SLI for those people crazy enough to have purchased that many GTX 1080s? The answer was quite surprising: NVIDIA is backing away from the idea of an "Enthusiast Key" and will no longer require it for enabling 3-Way and 4-Way SLI. 

Here is the official NVIDIA statement given to PC Perspective on the subject:

With the GeForce 10-series we’re investing heavily in 2-way SLI with our new High Bandwidth bridge (which doubles the SLI bandwidth for faster, smoother gaming at ultra-high resolutions and refresh rates) and NVIDIA Game Ready Driver SLI profiles.  To ensure the best possible gaming experience on our GeForce 10-series GPUs, we’re focusing our efforts on 2-way SLI only and will continue to include 2-way SLI profiles in our Game Ready Drivers.
 
DX12 and NVIDIA VR Works SLI technology also allows developers to directly implement and control multi-GPU support within their games.  If a developer chooses to use these technologies then their game will not need SLI profiles.  Some developers may also decide to support more than 2 GPUs in their games. We continue to work with all developers creating games and VR applications that take advantage of 2 or more GPUs to make sure they’ll work great on GeForce 10-series GPUs.
 
For our overclocking community, our Game Ready Drivers will also include SLI profiles for 3- and 4-way configurations for specific OC applications only, including Fire Strike, Unigine and Catzilla.

I cant say I agree with this. It may be niche but why outright disable it? Why not instead work on making it function exactly like two way?

http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/GeForce-GTX-1080-and-1070-3-Way-and-4-Way-SLI-will-not-be-enabled-games

[2FA]

Talk about abandoning a technology even if the scaling is bad.

[Antony Leung]

4 minutes ago, thekeemo said:

NVIDIA is backing away from the idea of an "Enthusiast Key" and will no longer require it for enabling 3-Way and 4-Way SLI. 

I hope this is true. because it will be a dumb decision of Nvidia if they continue to do this. Is like EA and Ubisoft with their DLC's

[AresKrieger]

Honestly I still don't see the point of 3/4 way sli, though it is also pointless to require a key to access a feature of your product.

 

Either way I'm surprised they did this stupid enthusiast key thing to begin with

[manikyath]

honestly 3- and 4-way SLI is so much backend work for such a low market share, and such low performance benefit that its honestly not worth it.

 

i guess if AMD wants to eat at some market share, they should have a monsterous 3- and 4-way CF option on one of their cards. (RX480 is not that, it'll have to be the RX490 or up)

[Godlygamer23]

In reality, this is the truth with SLI in general. Yes, most applications and games may support at least two-way SLI, but there are times where SLI compatibility is sketchy, or outright non-functional.

[thekeemo]

12 minutes ago, manikyath said:

honestly 3- and 4-way SLI is so much backend work for such a low market share, and such low performance benefit that its honestly not worth it.

 

i guess if AMD wants to eat at some market share, they should have a monsterous 3- and 4-way CF option on one of their cards. (RX480 is not that, it'll have to be the RX490 or up)

 

3 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

In reality, this is the truth with SLI in general. Yes, most applications and games may support at least two-way SLI, but there are times where SLI compatibility is sketchy, or outright non-functional.

Yes but why disable it on purpose? Even if it doesnt work all that well at least leave the option open..

[Godlygamer23]

1 minute ago, thekeemo said:

Yes but why disable it on purpose? Even if it doesnt work all that well at least leave the option open..

It's not disabled completely, but really, the whole idea of three-way and four-way SLI is not worth it. So NVIDIA might be looking at areas where it scales best, and allows more than two cards to be used there. Then for every other application, limiting it to two-way SLI for best possible scaling. I'm not saying I agree with NVIDIA's decision, as I believe that we should be able to use three and four-way SLI if we so desire in applications/games, but I'm trying to see NVIDIA's logic here.

 

They've already stated that their cards are not built for anything more than two in an SLI config due to their new methodology of using both fingers at the same time.

[Curufinwe_wins]

3 minutes ago, thekeemo said:

 

Yes but why disable it on purpose? Even if it doesnt work all that well at least leave the option open..

That's what they are doing duh...  They are no longer giving full support for 3/4 way and are no longer recommending it. They also look to probably not require those stupid enthusiast keys, but that doesn't mean they won't allow it at all. 

 

I don't see how this changes that. 

[Tedol]

Someone use 3and4 way SLI ? 

[Masada02]

Or they could just abandon the whole SLI bridge like AMD did...

 

3 and 4 ways are fun. Not practical, but fun. 

 

[Belgarathian]

I've seen a few people use it, but I would assume that this doesn't prevent using 4xTitan for compute and rendering workloads, just for gaming. 

 

Kinda glad this happened. It'll be interesting to see enthusiast boards move to 2x PCIe 16x and leave more PCI lanes open for other things line NVMe drives and other add-in cards. 

[thekeemo]

2 minutes ago, Belgarathian said:

I've seen a few people use it, but I would assume that this doesn't prevent using 4xTitan for compute and rendering workloads, just for gaming. 

 

Kinda glad this happened. We'll not see enthusiast boards move to 2x PCIe 16x and leave more PCI lanes open for other things line NVMe drives and other add-in cards. 

The PCI-E lanes are open anyway if you dont use the slots.. and z170 has a separate lanes for NVMe

[SkilledRebuilds]

First thing I thought of was 4x Multiple GPU rendering abilities... and if they are affected in the same way.

Surely they would add rendering/encoding apps to the allowed list.

[thekeemo]

1 minute ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

First thing I thought of was 4x Multiple GPU rendering abilities... and if they are affected in the same way.

Surely they would add rendering/encoding apps to the allowed list.

They are not affected at all since they dont use SLI

[VagabondWraith]

Still wish nVidia would abandon the SLI bridge once and for all.  Looks so much cleaner to me and scales way better.

[zMeul]

 

[Deli]

Good work, Nvidia. Hope I won't see idiot thread like this again, "my 4-way SLI GTX1080 is bottlenecked by the 6950X. What can I do?"

[SSL]

3 hours ago, thekeemo said:

Why not instead work on making it function exactly like two way?

 

Because it's too much work for too little benefit to too few people. You may as well ask why not develop N-way SLI; well, because it isn't worth it.

[UnknownEngineer]

Ok, so 3 and 4 way SLI can't be used in games, but it can be used in benchmarks. This doesn't make sense to me, PC benchmarks are often used solely to gauge gaming performance, especially if GPU are involved, so why enable 3 and 4 way SLI for that? Doing this for just the "overclocking community" is odd, doing all that work that is apparently too much to do otherwise for a game, for a niche group of people.

[pyrojoe34]

2 hours ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

First thing I thought of was 4x Multiple GPU rendering abilities... and if they are affected in the same way.

Surely they would add rendering/encoding apps to the allowed list.

Computational jobs (rendering, CUDA, modeling, simulations, etc) do not use SLI at all. It's pretty much exclusive to gaming. Our molecular docking core has plenty of 2-4 GPU systems and not a single one uses SLI.

[thekeemo]

1 hour ago, SSL said:

 

Because it's too much work for too little benefit to too few people. You may as well ask why not develop N-way SLI; well, because it isn't worth it.

Remember the 8 (or was it 10?) Way sli rumors?

[Stefan1024]

To kill 3 and 4-way SLI is ok.

Telling us it will be enabled and than just don't do it (there in no really useful application in the "selected" list) is NOT ok. Once again Nvidia made a bad move.

 

[DXMember]

28 minutes ago, UnknownEngineer said:

Ok, so 3 and 4 way SLI can't be used in games, but it can be used in benchmarks. This doesn't make sense to me, PC benchmarks are often used solely to gauge gaming performance, especially if GPU are involved, so why enable 3 and 4 way SLI for that? Doing this for just the "overclocking community" is odd, doing all that work that is apparently too much to do otherwise for a game, for a niche group of people.

cuz they don't want to lose the hall of fame leaderboards on 3DMark and Catzilla - it's free PR for them and really skews the reality of it

[BuckGup]

4 hours ago, AresKrieger said:

Honestly I still don't see the point of 3/4 way sli, though it is also pointless to require a key to access a feature of your product.

 

Either way I'm surprised they did this stupid enthusiast key thing to begin with

DX12!!! SLI is dead but DX12 multi gpu scaling is almost 1:1. I think it might be