Thursday, June 9th 2016
NVIDIA GeForce "Pascal" 3-way and 4-way SLI Restricted to Select Non-Gaming Apps
In a move that's set to not go down well with gamers looking for 4K 60 Hz gameplay with eye-candy maxed out; NVIDIA has changed the way it approaches 3-way and 4-way SLI support for the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. While out of the box, you can enable 2-way SLI using either an SLI HB bridge (recommended for certain high resolutions), or even a classic 2-way SLI bridge; 3-way and 4-way SLI support will be restricted to a select few non-gaming apps.
At the launch of the GTX 1080, NVIDIA told the press that it will officially not support 3-way and 4-way SLI for GeForce "Pascal" GPUs, however, it will provide a recourse for enthusiasts, by setting up an "SLI enthusiast key" webpage, from which enthusiasts can obtain a software key that unlocks 3-way and 4-way SLI support using classic bridges. NVIDIA would have merely optimized its drivers up to 2-way SLI, and the odd lucky gamer would be able to take advantage of 3-4 GPUs if a game developer got generous. That's no more to be.
NVIDIA has reportedly removed the entire "software key" process of unlocking 3-way and 4-way SLI support. You should be able to enable SLI for 3-4 GPUs, but only a list of apps selected by NVIDIA will be able to take advantage of >2 GPUs from your setup, for now. These include popular 3D benchmarks such as Unigine Heaven, 3DMark FireStrike, and Catzilla. NVIDIA may expand this list with future driver updates.
The idea behind this appears to be to appease overclockers who mostly score on synthetic benchmarks, while not having to deal with complaints of choppy display output from gamers. Overclockers only care about the numerical score a benchmark spits out, and not the fluidity of the benchmark's 3D scene. Gameplay, on the other hand, relies on smooth output.
Source:
PC Perspective
At the launch of the GTX 1080, NVIDIA told the press that it will officially not support 3-way and 4-way SLI for GeForce "Pascal" GPUs, however, it will provide a recourse for enthusiasts, by setting up an "SLI enthusiast key" webpage, from which enthusiasts can obtain a software key that unlocks 3-way and 4-way SLI support using classic bridges. NVIDIA would have merely optimized its drivers up to 2-way SLI, and the odd lucky gamer would be able to take advantage of 3-4 GPUs if a game developer got generous. That's no more to be.
The idea behind this appears to be to appease overclockers who mostly score on synthetic benchmarks, while not having to deal with complaints of choppy display output from gamers. Overclockers only care about the numerical score a benchmark spits out, and not the fluidity of the benchmark's 3D scene. Gameplay, on the other hand, relies on smooth output.
46 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce "Pascal" 3-way and 4-way SLI Restricted to Select Non-Gaming Apps
On the other, why bother wasting resources coding for a setup <1% of NVidia owners actually have that doesn't achieve a whole lot anyway (4 way scaling is abysmal). This isn't going to affect many people on this forum at all. Benchmarkers can still run benchmarks, and crunchers never needed SLI anyway.
Fuck up again. How this has become something expected from nVidia. As to buy a good race car and would not be able to ride with him on the racing track at full capacity.
How many times have we been raped from this company with prices, bad products, software bugs .We should get donations GPUs as a gift for damages! Not to mention that the prices.
I like how SLI/xfire just doesn't work for shit, nowadays. I remember my 4890s/8800GTs. I almost NEVER had a problem with dual cards. Gaming was fantastic. The drivers AND games were far superior, then. And if you older guys remember, before broadband was common, games were incredibly polished and ran with amazing performance. I could ALWAYS max out every game and play with vsync at bare min of 60 fps solid, if not 85 or 120 (CRT ftw).
I wouldn't be surprised if the new and shiny 1080Ti/Pascal-based Titan magically support 3- and 4-way SLI once more (for a premium of course). :cool:
Just like SLI could only be used on licensed chipsets/mainboards in the past (where you had to pay a premium of course), even if it would've worked on a non-licensed mainboard as well.
Once there is support for AFR, this can in theory scale to any number of GPUs. There is no need for the software to add support for each multi-GPU configuration. So it's not like this is extra development work for them, it's mostly just QA.
In games with good multi-GPU support they usually scale well up to three GPUs, and some struggle to utilize four GPUs. That's due to bottlenecks in the game engines, in theory there should be no problem scaling up to four GPUs for current hardware.Not quite. Direct3D and Vulkan will expose the same hardware features which currently are utilized directly for each vendor. The advantage of this would be that game developers no longer would have to interface with each native API, but we'll see in time if it works just as well.
The only problem I have with this is them backing out of what they said. Personally its actually understandable that they want to go ahead and drop the support just wish they had been up front about it instead of gettings peoples hopes up.
Clearly, it's because there are very few 3-4 way SLI setups out there so it's not economic for NVIDIA to support them, but it still sucks for those with deep pockets that would like to try it.
At least I can still run my old twin GTX 590s whenever I feel like some hot and sweaty 4-way SLI action, lol.
Other wise you wont buy a 800€ card with a simple sli bridge,
But whowever I can be wrong.
What been said above feels to me nonsense, cutting down profit :banghead:.
Just a though.
And I expect the most vocal people will be those who either (A) don't use Nvidia cards or (b) don't use 3 or 4 cards. Go figure. FWIW, I googled a couple of older sli 2-4 way comparisons and guess what, until using 4k res with ultra settings and very game dependent there are little benefits to 3 or 4 way. Most titles benefit greatly from 2 way, a smaller 10-20% extra increase for 3 way and 4 way yields very little extra performance for most titles.
Much crying over little milk
I dont have many issues with SLI, but then I always wait 6+ months before buying a game. The only game I didnt wait for was battlefield, which has great SLI performance.
Not that this really matters if you are playing in DX12, DX12 will allow you to use all 3 or 4 GPU's regardless to what nvidia says you can or cannot do.Don't know you tell me, oh wait...