Why is Nvidia trying to rule out 3-way and 4-way SLI?

[Bluebeano]

With the 10 series cards, you have to get a special key to use 3 way SLI and it isnt recommended, why is this? Surely they'd get more money if they encouraged it

[Prokart2000]

1 minute ago, Bluebeano said:

With the 10 series cards, you have to get a special key to use 3 way SLI and it isnt recommended, why is this? Surely they'd get more money if they encouraged it

maybe so they can fine tune 2 way sli for more performance instead of enhancing 3 way and 4 way for each card

[Arcanekitten]

1 hour ago, Bluebeano said:

With the 10 series cards, you have to get a special key to use 3 way SLI and it isnt recommended, why is this? Surely they'd get more money if they encouraged it

They want to get the 2 way setups more stable in utilization because its the most used setup also the special key thing is gone as just read it in a article.

[Bluebeano]

2 minutes ago, Prokart2000 said:

maybe so they can fine tune 2 way sli for more performance instead of enhancing 3 way and 4 way for each card

But surely from a business point of view, encourage people to buy more cards each, get more $

[Prokart2000]

2 minutes ago, Bluebeano said:

But surely from a business point of view, encourage people to buy more cards each, get more $

i agree, it was the only liable reason i could think of

[Oshino Shinobu]

Most likely because it sucks. Better for them to focus on 2 way SLI and not waste their time with 3 and 4 way.

 

2 minutes ago, Bluebeano said:

But surely from a business point of view, encourage people to buy more cards each, get more $

They also potentially save money on development and support for 3 and 4 way SLI, as well as the fact that the vast majority of users don't run more than 2 cards in SLI anyway, 

[themaniac]

2 minutes ago, Bluebeano said:

But surely from a business point of view, encourage people to buy more cards each, get more $

the R&D to optimize 3 and 4 way setups could counteract the profits

[Deli]

1 hour ago, Bluebeano said:

But surely from a business point of view, encourage people to buy more cards each, get more $

Have the funding to run 3 or 4 highend expensive cards belongs to a very small minority of gamers.

[Phoenix721]

No one really uses 2 GPUs, and even less people use 3 and 4. Not worth investing in optimizing 3 and 4 way SLI, a pretty smart move from them.

[incarnate]

1 hour ago, Bluebeano said:

But surely from a business point of view, encourage people to buy more cards each, get more $

Sure, if you don't care about your brand. Do a quick search on YouTube for 3 and 4 way sli performance and you find tons of videos criticising the terrible scaling. You nearly gain any performance past 2 cards.

 

The people that know this fact don't buy into 3/4 way sli, unless they don't care and just want to throw money away.

 

The problem lies in the people that DON'T know about this scaling issue, buy 4 top tier cards and find out that someone who paid half gets about 80-90% off the performance.

 

What do you think that person is gonna think of nvidia? People who are pissed are far far more vocal than satisfied customers. And they will do damage to the brand.

 

It's fucking regard for nvidia to encourage 3/4 way sli when they won't be fixing the scaling issues. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I applaud nvidia for doing the consumer friendly thing here.

[Pomfinator]

1 hour ago, Bluebeano said:

But surely from a business point of view, encourage people to buy more cards each, get more $

They would really much rather you go and buy a Quadro or a Tesla before considering 3 or 4 way SLI.

[VagabondWraith]

3 minutes ago, Pomfinator said:

They would really much rather you go and buy a Quadro or a Tesla before considering 3 or 4 way SLI.

Quadro's and Tesla's are not gaming cards.

[Pomfinator]

1 minute ago, VagabondWraith said:

Quadro's and Tesla's are not gaming cards.

And 3/4 way SLI never were any good for gaming either.  Hence my point being they would rather you buy one of their expensive compute cards rather than ghetto it out with multiple gaming cards.

[VagabondWraith]

1 minute ago, Pomfinator said:

And 3/4 way SLI never were any good for gaming either.  Hence my point being they would rather you buy one of their expensive compute cards rather than ghetto it out with multiple gaming cards.

Yes, but people who were buying 3/4 way SLI were gaming. They were never going to buy a professional card anyway. 

[jollander]

Consider from a business standpoint if you'd put R&D in to properly scaling 3 and 4-way SLI.

• Money spent on R&D (a lot)
• Money gained by enthusiasts buying 3 or 4 cards (marginal considering the percentage of people buying 2 new cards)
• Money LOST when releasing a new generation, just to have everyone buy up 3 more (used) cards of the previous gen instead of buying a new one (a lot)

Why in the world would i buy a 1080 if i could get 3 more 980s from the used market and absolutely demolish the 1080 and still save money?

 

I suspect the reason SLI scales badly is less of a technical challenge and more just clever business. They could get it to work well if they really, really wanted to.

[Briggsy]

Because its for nothing more than epeen. Even 2-way is sketchy at times, 3-way and 4-way is just a mess outside of synthetic benchmarks.

[incarnate]

1 hour ago, jollander said:

Snip

You bring up really good points.

[CurryCalgs]

Sli scaling is very poor after 2 Cards much worse the Crossfire. the new bridge should make 2 way sli great again. 

[BunnyLab]

3 hours ago, Bluebeano said:

But surely from a business point of view, encourage people to buy more cards each, get more $

Don't worry, nvidia is getting lots of your $$$.