SLI support for games in future? ( 1070 in sli? or 1080 single)

[keavlar]

Hey guys.

For a long time, every one says , that there are not , that much games, that support SLI, and some of the games, even won't allow you to play, unless you will disconect the SLI mode.

 So i still wonder, maybe in future , there will be support for SLI?

So i could buy GTX 1070 single now, and in half or 1 year , to get another one for SLI??

What you suggest ?

Curentlly i ended up raking the 27 inch monitor , 2560x1440 , instead of 3440x1440 . so i think , i can play ultra with 1070, and in future, when get the 34 Inch , get second GTX 1070. for SLI.

What you say?

[Memories4K]

Usually i'd say go for the best single GPU but honestly?

 

The 1070 is the best value card right now and it performs so well for the money that i'd recommend the 1070s in SLI for that 1440p 100-144Hz target i'm sure you're trying to go for 

[Enderman]

No, multi-GPU configs are going downhill.

In a few years you can sell your 1070 and buy a 1170 or 1180 or whatever which will perform close to 1070SLI and cost the same.

[keavlar]

5 minutes ago, Memories4K said:

Usually i'd say go for the best single GPU but honestly?

 

The 1070 is the best value card right now and it performs so well for the money that i'd recommend the 1070s in SLI for that 1440p 144Hz target i'm sure you're trying to go for 

Actully, i dont really care about the 144, and i am also  , not gonna buy it . I just want to enjoy the ultra settings in BF1 and some other games.

[Memories4K]

6 minutes ago, keavlar said:

Actully, i dont really care about the 144, and i am also  , not gonna buy it . I just want to enjoy the ultra settings in BF1 and some other games.

In that case, just get the single 1080

[keavlar]

17 minutes ago, Memories4K said:

In that case, just get the single 1080

Ahh man, it is so hard to decide..  I want a biggest screen like 34 inch curved, but at the same time i want to save money . I mean, if i get 34inch and 1080 it will cost around 3000$   and if i get 27 inch and 1070 , it will be less then 1500 $ .. so hard to decide

[ARikozuM]

37 minutes ago, keavlar said:

Hey guys.

For a long time, every one says , that there are not , that much games, that support SLI, and some of the games, even won't allow you to play, unless you will disconect the SLI mode.

 So i still wonder, maybe in future , there will be support for SLI?

So i could buy GTX 1070 single now, and in half or 1 year , to get another one for SLI??

What you suggest ?

Curentlly i ended up raking the 27 inch monitor , 2560x1440 , instead of 3440x1440 . so i think , i can play ultra with 1070, and in future, when get the 34 Inch , get second GTX 1070. for SLI.

What you say?

I would get a 980 Ti. Very similar performance, in stock and going for about 400 at the moment.

[BrightCandle]

I have used dual cards for 8 years (4870X2, 5970, 2x7970, 2x680 and 2x970). I don't think there is a future in dual cards, their heyday has passed and got a single 1080 and I am going to explain why.

 

1) Right now hardware unboxed testing SLI found that about 65% of games scaled at all with SLI, only half more than about 50%. Indeed this also matches my own experience where SLI was excellent up until the beginning of 2016 where a large number of AAA games came out without support, most still don't have it. Games like the division scale very poorly. There is a reason why modern games scale worse, its because new rendering techniques are using output from the prior frame and with alternate frame rendering the images are on different GPUs and that requires special support from the manufacturer or stops it working at all. This type of rendering is going to continue, its critical to how the consoles work.

 

2) DX12 puts the support of multiple cards in the hands of the developers. They have to explicitly implement support either for AFR or using dual cards in the same frame. The issue is as shown by (1) and the history of dual cards the game developers have few incentives to do so. Dual cards is a very small part of the market and so its not worth all the technical effort to address it. The manufacturers on the other hand would love to sell you two of their cards, especially two of the high end ones so they put big teams (well Nvidia does, not so sure about AMD its support IMO was pretty terrible) to working around what game developers do to make it work as best as they can. It goes well beyond profiles for games regularly big AAA games get specific and very custom support to make it work. The fact that Nvidia is doing that tells you the game developers were not willing to. So handling them all the responsibility to develop for this with DX12 is going to end badly, they aren't going to use it.

 

3) With DX12 being the future what do current DX12 games tell us? Well AoS has support for dual cards but it scales badly, Hitman added it long after release but its useless and everything else didn't. Its not been there on day 1 for anything but AoS (which is a technical demo lets be honest, its not a well played game). If the initial super excited development to be using DX12 can't be bothered to add it what do you think happens with your usual poorly ported console game?!

 

4) VR. Despite Nvidia and AMD both having support for dual eye rendering for VR since the HMDs came out no games (like literally 0) have added support for it. Supposedly its only worth 30% extra performance, but we sorely need that 30% and with no games currently supporting existing mechanisms for dynamic resolution I don't hold out much hope for SMP and such. But regardless VR has over 150 games for Vive right now and not a single one has dual card support. Infact some of them flicker and mess about with two GPUs until you turn SLI off.

 

So SLI IMO worked really well for years, it regularly scaled 80%+ in all the games where it mattered. But as we transition from DX11 to DX12 SLI support is dropping off, new rendering techniques have taken their toll already this year and the game developers history and recent history of lack of support for dual card. More than that VR is showing how little interest there is in adding specific support to games even when they really need it like in Elite Dangerous. For these reasons I bought a single 1080. Its actually quite a bit slower in some games like overwatch than my dual 970s but in VR its helped enormously and unfortunately my analysis of what is happening in the market from 3 months ago is just playing out as I predict unfortunately. I would have preferred 2x 1070s just like with the previous generation it was definitely better value than a single 980 but this time the gap from the 1070 to the 1080 was much larger (30%) and I think that on average is a bitter pill to swallow.