Friday, December 8th 2017
NVIDIA TITAN V Lacks SLI or NVLink Support
Earlier today, we brought you a story about NVIDIA TITAN V setting you back by up to $7,196 for two cards and two $600 NVLink cables. We got word from NVIDIA that the card neither features NVLink, nor supports SLI, and have since edited it. The NVLink fingers on the TITAN V card are rudiments of the functional NVLink interface found on the Tesla V100 PCIe, being developed by NVIDIA, as the TITAN V, Tesla V100, and a future Quadro GV100 share a common PCB. The NVLink fingers on the TITAN V are concealed by the base-plate of the cooler on one side, and the card's back-plate on the other; so the female connectors of NVLink bridge cables can't be plugged in.
With the lack of SLI support on what is possibly it's fastest graphics card based on the "Volta" architecture, NVIDIA seems to have responded to market trends that multi-GPU is dying or dead. That said, it would be interesting to see if professional overclockers chasing benchmark leaderboard glory pick up the TITAN V, as opposed to two TITAN Xp in SLI or four Radeon RX Vega 64 in 4-way CrossFireX.
With the lack of SLI support on what is possibly it's fastest graphics card based on the "Volta" architecture, NVIDIA seems to have responded to market trends that multi-GPU is dying or dead. That said, it would be interesting to see if professional overclockers chasing benchmark leaderboard glory pick up the TITAN V, as opposed to two TITAN Xp in SLI or four Radeon RX Vega 64 in 4-way CrossFireX.
49 Comments on NVIDIA TITAN V Lacks SLI or NVLink Support
Now here I am and it's completely awful. Instead I built an excellent ITX build (Which is cool because I travel a lot), and in fact I don't see mega PC's being viable again for at least 2-3 years....
It's proprietary, not unlike IF from AMD or Intel's ominpath (competitor to Infiniband). This doesn't mean that it can't work with x86 or ARM CPU's, in the future, just that it cannot right now.
But eventually it just wasn't profitable to keep applying so much manpower to an awesome, but WAY underutilized feature. AMD got higher performance, but Nvidia's more consistently worked (some years). Nvidia phased it out slowly - First Nvidia limited the first Titan to 3-way, then Pascal went with 2-way, and now the new Titan has ZERO sli support. Oh, and AMD only supported it through Polaris because they had to (But now Vega is out).
For now all of the competing API's and engines are making mGPU pointless to support. AMD was right when they insisted that DX12 move mGPU to the driver level, but DX12/Vulkan won't be the standard for at least 2-3 years. Once they ARE the standard, I expect mGPU to maybe become bigger than it ever has been.... But it is a BIG "maybe."
Cool story bro.
But it is still good. Priced like a Quadro V6000 tho.
Both Omnipath and Infiniband are in a slightly different niche, generally for connecting systems on a step higher level.
This is the final middle finger to all those noobs saying Titan is 'a gaming card'. "But if I want to and I can, why wouldn't I buy one for gaming?"
Suck on that