How hard could it be?

[Nicnac]

Hey,

I was just wondering since nvidia disabled SLI on the lower end 10series GPUs how hard it would be for someone with certain skills to modify a driver for it to allow SLI of let's say 1060s. Obviously I know nothing about this, maybe they even put in some form of hardware limitation? Just a thought experiment of mine...

On another note: I'd love to see more games use explicit multiadapter!

[flibberdipper]

It'd be really hard since SLI requires the use of the bridges.

[Megah3rtz]

Well I mean the 1060 doesn't even have an SLI connector so there's your first problem. 

[vanished]

Well, they would have to do more than just unlock the ability (assuming that can even be done).  They would have to make SLI work over the PCIe bus without a bridge - something not even nvidia themselves seems to be able to figure out.

[DocSwag]

There's no SLI fingers so it's probably not possible without changing the API itself. AMD had to add something to the GPU itself to make it possible to do crossfire over the pcie slot so I doubt it can be done with modifying the driver.

[bgibbz]

It's more than a software switch, nvidia physically didn't put the hardware for sli on the card. 

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Well, they would have to do more than just unlock the ability (assuming that can even be done).  They would have to make SLI work over the PCIe bus without a bridge - something not even nvidia themselves seems to be able to figure out.

Didn't AMD manage to pull that off just about with XFire?

[Nicnac]

Multiadapter works without bridges though. So theoretically speaking, would a software solution be possible?

[Mira Yurizaki]

The whole thing without a bridge depends on a lot of factors. For one, what if the SLI bridge is simply low latency? NVIDIA cards need a constant stream of data to be fed, and so if there's a hiccup in the chain, there it would easily show. AMD cards need large amounts of data to crunch to be kept happy and that can probably hide latency.

 

If that didn't make sense:

NVIDIA: Requires frequent transfer of commands to crunch to be happy

AMD: Requires large amounts of commands to crunch to be happy.

 

14 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Well, they would have to do more than just unlock the ability (assuming that can even be done).  They would have to make SLI work over the PCIe bus without a bridge - something not even nvidia themselves seems to be able to figure out.

You're forgetting the older GeForce 6 and 7 cards that could do it without a bridge.

[vorticalbox]

18 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Well, they would have to do more than just unlock the ability (assuming that can even be done).  They would have to make SLI work over the PCIe bus without a bridge - something not even nvidia themselves seems to be able to figure out.

or unwilling to because it costs money to change things.

[vanished]

52 minutes ago, FJRiley said:

Didn't AMD manage to pull that off just about with XFire?

Not just about, they did, and have for quite some time now.

[Mira Yurizaki]

42 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

or unwilling to because it costs money to change things.

Maybe NVIDIA could enable SLI and only devote enough resources to the lower end spectrum so that it doesn't simply crash your computer and leave it as a "at your own risk" deal.

[Sentinal]

Kind of hard... you need a bridge

 

[Glenwing]

6 hours ago, FJRiley said:

Didn't AMD manage to pull that off just about with XFire?

Yes, by releasing new graphics cards, not with a driver update.

 

You need SLI bridges to use SLI, and the GTX 1060 doesn't have a place to plug in an SLI bridge. It would be like asking for a driver hack to add an extra HDMI port or something.