Demystifying the max 2 gpu myth..

[SirFlamenco]

Hi !

 

So as seeing as much ignorance on this forum is bleach worthy, I will demisitfy something for you today *Mindblown*. It's the 3 and 4 way sli pascal myth. Because YES, you can use that in game, Wonder how? Well, with that : 

It's basically tricking the gpu that you are in a benchmark (Catzilla I think in this video) through Nvidia Inspector. Really easy to do and take only one minute. Scaling is really great on games as shown there : 

And also : 

So that was all for me, hope you learned something new today  

Edited August 10, 2017 by TheRandomness
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[Sauron]

I'd love to see these people's faces if nvidia suddenly blocks the exploit in a new driver.

[SirFlamenco]

2 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I'd love to see these people's faces if nvidia suddenly blocks the exploit in a new driver.

Well it's not really an exploit and Nvidia isn't involved in that, so it should not happen. 

[flibberdipper]

1 minute ago, rrubberr said:

Why, because they spent good money that would then be wasted?

Because NVOODIA WE TAKE AL UR DOLARS AND MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[tom_w141]

1 minute ago, rrubberr said:

Why, because they spent good money that would then be wasted?

Well his name is Sauron... Sounds like the kind of thing he'd enjoy

[Jonathan Lemmens]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

I'd love to see these people's faces if nvidia suddenly blocks the exploit in a new driver.

Why would they? If this somehow would become "the new thing" Nvideo would just sell more GPU's and still doesn't have to officially support 3 and 4 way SLI, win-win for them imo.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

Just now, SirFlamenco said:

Well it's not really an exploit and Nvidia does nothing in that, so it should not happen. 

It happened all the time with "hybrid PhysX", cat-and-mouse game. Until the developer gave up, but of course, no one forces you to update the driver (especially if the update consists in breaking functionality). Same here, I would be backing up the current drivers just in case.

[QuantumBit]

Wish 1060s would support SLI....

[Sauron]

Just now, SirFlamenco said:

Well it's not really an exploit and Nvidia does nothing in that, so it should not happen. 

nVidia is infamous for this sort of thing.

18 minutes ago, Jonathan Lemmens said:

Why would they? If this somehow would become "the new thing" Nvideo would just sell more GPU's and still doesn't have to officially support 3 and 4 way SLI, win-win for them imo.

For the same reason they don't allow it officially in the first place.

[Sniperfox47]

Just now, Sauron said:

For the same reason they don't allow it officially in the first place.

Because it's dumb and causes more issues than it solves anyways?

 

Because maintaining support for a feature less than 1% of users actually use is a waste of resources?

 

Because the new high bandwidth setup is cheaper to maintain?

 

Am I missing one? I don't feel any of these would encourage them to deal with this. If you do this and stuff breaks they can just go "Well we told you not to do it and that it's not supported."

 

 

[Jonathan Lemmens]

4 minutes ago, Sauron said:

For the same reason they don't allow it officially in the first place.

They don't "don't allow it". They just don't want to support it, which is a major difference. 

 

It costs quite a lot to employ people to code drivers for this and validate it with their newer hardware etc. If they can cut this cost but still have people buying more cards for 3 and 4 way SLI, why wouldn't they?

[DildorTheDecent]

46 minutes ago, SirFlamenco said:

Hi !

 

So as seeing as much ignorance on this forum is bleach worthy, I will demisitfy something for you today *Mindblown*. It's the 3 and 4 way sli pascal myth. Because YES, you can use that in game, Wonder how? Well, with that : 

This was discussed after the Pascal launch i think. Anything more than two still works if you put a little effort in. 

 

Although trust some people to go "hur ba-dur novideo/ngreedia is bad"

[SpaceGhostC2C]

10 minutes ago, Jonathan Lemmens said:

They don't "don't allow it". They just don't want to support it, which is a major difference. 

 

It costs quite a lot to employ people to code drivers for this and validate it with their newer hardware etc. If they can cut this cost but still have people buying more cards for 3 and 4 way SLI, why wouldn't they?

It still puts a constraint on how much can you charge for higher end cards. Single card solutions have many advantages over miltiple-GPU solutions, but they don't have an infinite advantage - two lesser cards can be better than the highest end card if you charge enough for the latter. Completely removing SLI from the map, on the other hand, breaks all arbitrage possibilities, and allows for a much less linear (more "convex") pricing (meaning, charging arbitrarily higher prices for a given increase in performance).

I do not think this is very relevant for 3 and 4 GPU setups, though, but more about eventually getting rid of all SLI, or all except the highest en model (for extremely high resolutions and because there is no higher GPU to price anyway).

[Sauron]

10 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Because it's dumb and causes more issues than it solves anyways?

 

Because maintaining support for a feature less than 1% of users actually use is a waste of resources?

 

Because the new high bandwidth setup is cheaper to maintain?

nVidia never seemed to care. They didn't care when they stopped official support for more than 2-way sli, they didn't care when they artificially blocked physx cards on amd systems, they didn't care when they blocked pcie passthrough, they didn't care when they decided you couldn't run their cards on less than an 8x pcie slot regardless of generation (meaning that you need 3.0 8x despite it being twice as fast as 2.0 8x), they didn't care when they blocked sli across different cards with the same die... you get the picture. If this catches on you'd better believe they'll block it.

10 minutes ago, Jonathan Lemmens said:

It costs quite a lot to employ people to code drivers for this and validate it with their newer hardware etc. If they can cut this cost but still have people buying more cards for 3 and 4 way SLI, why wouldn't they?

See above, they don't care what it costs. nVidia has always behaved like this, I see no reason why this particular instance would be different. The best you can hope for is that they won't notice.

13 minutes ago, Jonathan Lemmens said:

They don't "don't allow it". They just don't want to support it, which is a major difference. 

It just means they don't want you do to it and you'll have no recourse if it suddenly stops working after a driver update.

[Jonathan Lemmens]

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

nVidia never seemed to care. They didn't care when they stopped official support for more than 2-way sli, they didn't care when they artificially blocked physx cards on amd systems, they didn't care when they blocked pcie passthrough, they didn't care when they decided you couldn't run their cards on less than an 8x pcie slot regardless of generation (meaning that you need 3.0 8x despite it being twice as fast as 2.0 8x), they didn't care when they blocked sli across different cards with the same die... you get the picture. If this catches on you'd better believe they'll block it.

 

See above, they don't care what it costs. nVidia has always behaved like this, I see no reason why this particular instance would be different. The best you can hope for is that they won't notice.

The red line through this story is Nvidia wanting to make more money, I do not see how actively blocking 3 and 4 way SLI will help them achieve that. If they would block it completely, it will just be a dick move with no financial gain on the other end.

Also AMD still supports up to 4 way crossfire even on Vega. So Nvidia will be hesitant to ban it completely.

 

8 minutes ago, Sauron said:

It just means they don't want you do to it

When and where did they say this? 

[Sauron]

12 minutes ago, Jonathan Lemmens said:

The red line through this story is Nvidia wanting to make more money, I do not see how actively blocking 3 and 4 way SLI will help them achieve that. If they would block it completely, it will just be a dick move with no financial gain on the other end.

Also AMD still supports up to 4 way crossfire even on Vega. So Nvidia will be hesitant to ban it completely.

 

When and where did they say this? 

The fact they don't want you to do it is implicit in the lack of support... and as for wanting to make money, I don't see how they make more money from arbitrary pcie requirements, blocking vfio, etc either. They just look like dick moves to me. Of course the end goal is money, but what they think will make them more money doesn't always make sense... at least, not to you or me. They must be doing SOMETHING right given they lead the market by a large margin though.

 

AMD has been supporting all of these things for years, including lower bandwidth pcie, cross-gpu crossfire, 4 way crossfire, they even suggested they might be looking into 5 way crossifre at some point. And yet, amd is by far the underdog.

 

Either way, I don't claim to know the motives behind their behaviour - I just know that they have done things like this multiple times in the past, so I fully expect them to do it now. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, just don't be surprised if they do.

[DildorTheDecent]

If nvidia were REALLY through with SLi then they wouldn't put profiles in near every Game Ready Driver update. 

 

Changelogs are full of SLi fixes for goofy setups and games. 

[Sniperfox47]

4 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I don't see how they make more money from arbitrary pcie requirements

I highly doubt it's arbitrary. It's likely due to electrical or signalling requirements between the cards. SLI still has a lot of legacy crud left over in it from Scan Line Interleave, and works substantially different from crossfire.

 

5 minutes ago, Sauron said:

blocking vfio

Because they implemented this driver check at a time when they were pushing more and more for their GRID GPUs for remote solutions. The vast majority of users who used their GPUs with VMs were people that they could push their GRID GPU solutions to for waaaaaaaaaaay more money.

 

37 minutes ago, Sauron said:

artificially blocked physx cards on amd systems

This should be obvious... It discourages users from buying AMD systems, thereby giving their competition less money and resources to innovate with, hobbling them, and allowing Nvidia to stay on top and ship more units >.>

[Sauron]

4 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

I highly doubt it's arbitrary. It's likely due to electrical or signalling requirements between the cards. SLI still has a lot of legacy crud left over in it from Scan Line Interleave, and works substantially different from crossfire.

 

Because they implemented this driver check at a time when they were pushing more and more for their GRID GPUs for remote solutions. The vast majority of users who used their GPUs with VMs were people that they could push their GRID GPU solutions to for waaaaaaaaaaay more money.

 

This should be obvious... It discourages users from buying AMD systems, thereby giving their competition less money and resources to innovate with, hobbling them, and allowing Nvidia to stay on top and ship more units >.>

1) Since pcie 3.0 4x and pcie 2.0 8x are identical in bandwidth, if the latter is supported there is no good reason the first shouldn't be. And I'm not talking about sli, I'm talking about single cards not working on a 4x slot even though the bandwidth is sufficient.

 

2) One could easily counter that point by arguing that a] if those customers just go to AMD (as people looking into vfio probably would) they not only won't be able to sell them grid, they won't be able to sell them a card either and b] to use grid you need a monster internet connection that most people simply don't have, so they're shutting out a significant portion of potential customers.

 

3) As for discouraging AMD buyers, facts have shown physx doesn't pull in customers. People didn't consider it at the moment of purchase and if they eventually thought it would be nice to have they wouldn't go out and sidegrade to another high end card just to get it.

 

Of course you can find a potential benefit to all of these, but then you can do it with this too - if you can't add another card or two to your setup when they're cheap and used you're forced to upgrade sooner. I would consider it a bad idea, but as I said I think the same of all other similar situations.

[Sniperfox47]

Just now, Sauron said:

1) Since pcie 3.0 4x and pcie 2.0 8x are identical in bandwidth, if the latter is supported there is no good reason the first shouldn't be. And I'm not talking about sli, I'm talking about single cards not working on a 4x slot even though the bandwidth is sufficient.

Umm... I'm not sure where you're coming from there. Single cards run fine on 4x slots. Here's even a comparison with benchmarks of various games on a 1080 running at 4x, 8x, and 16x using PCIe 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0...:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/

 

5 minutes ago, Sauron said:

2) One could easily counter that point by arguing that a] if those customers just go to AMD (as people looking into vfio probably would) they not only won't be able to sell them grid, they won't be able to sell them a card either and b] to use grid you need a monster internet connection that most people simply don't have, so they're shutting out a significant portion of potential customers.

Except there's not really any concern about remote workstation and cloud gaming companies going to AMD, or at least there weren't in 2014.

 

Average household consumers were not their market and aren't the kinds of users who typically use gaming VMs.

 

8 minutes ago, Sauron said:

3) As for discouraging AMD buyers, facts have shown physx doesn't pull in customers. People didn't consider it at the moment of purchase and if they eventually thought it would be nice to have they wouldn't go out and sidegrade to another high end card just to get it.

You may not be wrong, but that's also not how marketing works. Even if I'm not buying a product for a specific feature, it having that feature will guide my decision. Even if I would never actually even use that feature. Human psychology is pretty easy to take advantage of.

[Mira Yurizaki]

I dug for like five minutes on the interwebs and came across this: https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/GeForce-GTX-1080-and-1070-3-Way-and-4-Way-SLI-will-not-be-enabled-games

 

The reason why NVIDIA doesn't really want to support more than 2-way SLI is:

Quote

As DX12 and Vulkan next-generation APIs become more prolific, the game developers will still have the ability to directly access more than two GeForce GTX 10-series GPUs, though I expect that be a very narrow window of games simply due to development costs and time.

 

[DXMember]

 

[SirFlamenco]

On 2017-08-10 at 3:05 PM, DXMember said:

 

Yup, it shows how some people that are supposed to spread information are sometimes wrong. 

[Mick Naughty]

Pretty sure no one thought it couldn't be done. Just isn't worth the time and effort. Seeing in how old the chip is already.

[DXMember]

7 hours ago, SirFlamenco said:

Yup, it shows how some people that are supposed to spread information are sometimes wrong. 

but you still can't run more than two GPUs for 4K because of,