count me in as eagerly awaiting NVlink benches. I'm curious if it will work better/more seamlessly then SLI.
SLIs biggest problem was having to be supported individually on every program. Something like NVlink, if t did not require per program support, could see far wider spread adoption.
When SLI reached peak popularity, most people (and almost 100% of gamers) had large ATX, custom-built boxes. Hence, there was a large potential of selling them another card later on.
It's very different today.
First of all: many people game on laptops. I don't know how many... half? Maybe more.
We generally moved to smaller desktops as well - usually imposing a 1 GPU limit.
Nvidia is simply going with times. And clearly this strategy has worked for them.
ATX motherboards still sell incredibly well. While SFX builds and laptops are more popular now, ATX desktops still dominate the gaming world, and SLI adoption was never very high to begin with, even back in the late 2000s.
The size of the case didnt kill SLI, the lack of user interest did. As GPUs became powerful enough to push 1080p ultra, dualGPU rigs became incredibly rarer then they already were, and with such high support costs both in $$$ and man hours, its no surprise the idea eventually fizzled out.
Interesting, but I seriously doubt someone would use a platform as old as 32NM Sandy Bridge or heaven forbid, AMD FX
There are still a LOT of sandy bridge and FX machines out there. While the high end gaming machines may have left the platform years ago for PCIE3 and usb 3, there are plenty of mid range machines still on older arches. Hell, I just went from ivy bridge to ryzen, not for CPU performance, bu because my motherboard was on the fritz. I still know people on core 2 quads.
CPU performance inst a driving upgrade factor anymore, and a ton of these older platforms still exist. While they will not be buying 2080s, they WILL probably be interested in 3060s next gen, and those may also saturate 2.0 x 16.
