NVIDIA GeForce 456.38 WHQL Released: Ampere Support, SLI Finally Dead

[R-T-B]

It will support them.

Not how the changelog reads...

 

[ARF]

The difference between implicit and explicit. DX12 gives explicit multi-GPU rendering.
So, when you have two Ampere cards attached to your mobo, proper game that is optimised to work with multi-GPU configuration, then it will be fine and ok..

 

[Assimilator]

Looks like I more people are confused than me. It's a simple question:

I have 19 DirectX 11 games in my Steam library that I know support SLI and have a SLI profile.

If I buy 2x RTX 3090's for that magic 4K 120FPS (minimum) #, will I still be getting proper SLI support on my 19 DX11 games? or has Nvidia just purposely disabled that on the 3000 series and I would only get SLI support on 2000 series GPU's and below?

And the answer is equally simple, and already stated. Read it again. And do not spread FUD about NVIDIA "disabling" anything.

Also still driver errors with call of duty warzone.

That's because the game is a buggy POS. But as long as people like you keep rewarding EA for their failures by buying their buggy POS games, and blaming GPU manufacturers instead of EA, EA will happily take your money and keep churning out buggy POS games. So complain elsewhere, because you're part of the problem.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

I'm curious.

I guess pretty soon advances in fabrication will turn miniscule if not cease completely because you can only reduce transistors so much.

When that happens, it will be impossible to create larger and larger dies because it would require wafers of impossible sizes. Also, the video card itself only allows certain die dimensions.

The only way forward would be to stack GPU "cores" like CPU cores in which case it will become impossible to share the computational workload as it's currently done which means an alternative to SLI would be required.

How will NVIDIA/AMD/Intel/Apple/Qualcomm/Samsung/ARM/MediaTek/etc. approach this conundrum? Or will all game engines implement DirectX12/Vulkan multi-GPU scaling? Last time I heard it's extremely difficult to implement and only relatively large game development studios can afford it.

You would be surprised. There is a lot of research going on about possible new transistor architectures to continue to keep shrinking. The next one that most fabs are going to be using for 3nm and smaller is Gate-All-Around FET. Then we will probably be looking at carbon nano-tubes or sheets, etc depending on how effective the GAAFETs end up being at 3nm and 1.2(7)nm. We are in a similar situation with FINFET that we were in with the planar FET as we got to sub 20nm nodes. The conducting path from source to drain is actually getting so small that even if the transistor is off, there may be a flow of some electrons, which we don't want. This is a leakage issue, and a problem due to size of an election and the ever decreasing size of the channel.

 

[R-T-B]

The difference between implicit and explicit. DX12 gives explicit multi-GPU rendering.
So, when you have two Ampere cards attached to your mobo, proper game that is optimised to work

The last sentence is key.

DX12 switches the onus of development for mgpu to game devs, not driver devs. This effectively kills it outside triple-A game studios.

 

[ARF]

The last sentence is key.

DX12 switches the onus of development for mgpu to game devs, not driver devs. This effectively kills it outside triple-A game studios.

Well, given the rumours that Nvidia's next-gen Hopper designs will be MCM, then SLi will work in one form or another.

 

[Assimilator]

The last sentence is key.

DX12 switches the onus of development for mgpu to game devs, not driver devs. This effectively kills it outside triple-A game studios.

I guess my mistake was expecting users on a supposed "tech enthusiast" forum to understand the basics of multi-GPU, when what they think is "multi-GPU make game go brrrrr". Imagine if they cared enough to educate themselves!

Well, given the rumours that Nvidia's next-gen Hopper designs will be MCM, then SLi will work in one form or another.

Yes, in exactly the same way that AMD's intercore interconnects on Zen are like SLI!

Which is to say, completely different in every way except the most basic description.

 

[R-T-B]

I feel you, but gave up educating a while ago when I discovered flat earthers and those types roaming here... yikes.

Anyhow, back to the topic before we drift.

 

[kapone32]

Apparently you can't read either. The changelog states "Implicit SLI Disabled on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs". It does not state "Implicit SLI Disabled on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs except in DirectX 11".

There is no SLI on Ampere. There is multi-GPU support if and only if it's implemented via a graphics API. DirectX 11 does not have multi-GPU functionality, therefore no DirectX 11 games can have any sort of multi-GPU support on Ampere.

Does the 3090 not support NVlink just like the 2080TI.

 

[birdie]

You would be surprised. There is a lot of research going on about possible new transistor architectures to continue to keep shrinking. The next one that most fabs are going to be using for 3nm and smaller is Gate-All-Around FET. Then we will probably be looking at carbon nano-tubes or sheets, etc depending on how effective the GAAFETs end up being at 3nm and 1.2(7)nm. We are in a similar situation with FINFET that we were in with the planar FET as we got to sub 20nm nodes. The conducting path from source to drain is actually getting so small that even if the transistor is off, there may be a flow of some electrons, which we don't want. This is a leakage issue, and a problem due to size of an election and the ever decreasing size of the channel.

There's a limit to miniaturization and your reply doesn't deal with it at the slightest. There will be time when nothing could be done to make transistors smaller and faster, and performance could be increased only by stacking dies at the expense of infinitely increasing power consumption.

 

[moproblems99]

I know that there are tons of people that think Multi GPU is passe but at the end of the day it is my computer and my money to do with as I please.

That is true. Just don't complain because there is no support when you're told there is no support. Not directed at you. Royal and stuff.

 

[R-T-B]

Does the 3090 not support NVlink just like the 2080TI.

Physically, yes, but the software has never existed to use SLI on it with the 3090. I'm sure you could use it somehow, but not for SLI.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

There's a limit to miniaturization and your reply doesn't deal with it at the slightest. There will be time when nothing could be done to make transistors smaller and faster, and performance could be increases only by stacking dies at the expense of infinitely increasing power consumption.

We are still pretty far out from actually having to worry about that. I was expecting us to really have to worry about it once we got to below 5nm, but that doesn't seem to be the case. There are fabs coming out with different ways of doing the stacked dies packaging. Zero real implementation so far though. TSMCs 3DFabric could be pretty promising.

 

[Seyumi]

@Assimilator such hostility in your answers but thank you for answering none the less. Apologies that I'm not 100% up to speed on what explicit vs implicit SLI/Multi-GPU means. Goggle didn't provide any clear answers before I posted. I also don't know how framing my question (of Nvidia disabling SLI for 3000 series) in the form of a question is considered spreading "FUD" like you mentioned. I didn't explicitly say Nvidia did this, I was simply asking if that's what the driver release notes meant since I was a bit confused. I have 2x RTX 2080 Ti's in SLI/NvLink. I was thinking of going 2x RTX 3090's to now push 4K 120FPS (minimum) on my LG OLED but it looks like i'll just be sticking to 1x RTX 3090 instead.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Well obviously for Ampere GPUs, this is what this article is about, why would anyone even think I am talking about previous series...

You yourself asked why they were removing SLI support from previous ones.

And let's be clear, any older games you had that benefited from SLI would not need it anymore with this One card.

 

[birdie]

We are still pretty far out from actually having to worry about that. I was expecting us to really have to worry about it once we got to below 5nm, but that doesn't seem to be the case. There are fabs coming out with different ways of doing the stacked dies packaging. Zero real implementation so far though.

5nm CPUs are already produced (Apple's A14X) and I've already started worrying. Also, I'm not an engineer but AMD's 7nm CPUs/GPUs have become a lot harder to cool down than their higher nanometers counterparts. It seems to me we've already started hitting a brick wall in terms of efficiency and heat dissipation and it could get even worse going forward.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

5nm CPUs are already produced (Apple's A14X) and I've already started worrying. Also, I'm not an engineer but AMD's 7nm CPUs/GPUs have become a lot harder to cool down than their higher nanometers counterparts. It seems to me we've already started hitting brick wall in terms of efficiency and heat dissipation and it could be even worse going forward.

Designs play a huge roll in that though. Plus there's a lot of crazy things you can do to a FINFET to improve efficiency and the heat issue. Lithography method used helps a lot. There is a pretty huge shift in the industry to EUV now for some 7nm nodes and smaller.

My job we are dealing with 12nm and soon 7nm. Our dies are also smaller than 30mm^2

EUV: Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is a soft X-ray technology, which has a wavelength of 13.5nm. Today’s EUV scanners enable resolutions down to 22nm half-pitch. In a system, an EUV light... » read more

semiengineering.com

 

[TheLostSwede]

NVIDIA SLI Support Transitioning to Native Game Integrations - VideoCardz.com

With the emergence of low level graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, game developers are able to implement SLI support natively within the game itself instead of relying upon a SLI driver profile. The expertise of the game developer within their own code allows them to achieve the best...

videocardz.com

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

I guess my mistake was expecting users on a supposed "tech enthusiast" forum to understand the basics of multi-GPU, when what they think is "multi-GPU make game go brrrrr". Imagine if they cared enough to educate themselves!



Yes, in exactly the same way that AMD's intercore interconnects on Zen are like SLI!

Which is to say, completely different in every way except the most basic description.

If you where an PC Enthusiast you won't want SLI or Xfire to die at all. What gamers want is SLI and Xfire to die.

I guess my mistake was expecting users on a supposed "tech enthusiast" forum to understand the basics of multi-GPU, when what they think is "multi-GPU make game go brrrrr". Imagine if they cared enough to educate themselves!



Yes, in exactly the same way that AMD's intercore interconnects on Zen are like SLI!

Which is to say, completely different in every way except the most basic description.

Are you saying the next gpu would have a central hub for chiplets ?

 

[Seyumi]

[/QUOTE]

NVIDIA SLI Support Transitioning to Native Game Integrations - VideoCardz.com

With the emergence of low level graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, game developers are able to implement SLI support natively within the game itself instead of relying upon a SLI driver profile. The expertise of the game developer within their own code allows them to achieve the best...

videocardz.com

Thanks. That article actually answers my question more clearly than this Techpowerup article and even tells you the exact games that would work in DX12 multi-GPU mode on the 3090 and future GPU's.

Key points:

Existing SLI driver profiles will continue to be tested and maintained for SLI-ready RTX 20 Series and earlier GPUs.

For GeForce RTX 3090 and future SLI-capable GPUs, SLI will only be supported when implemented natively within the game.

AKA, if I buy 2x SLI RTX 3090's, I can kiss the SLI support on my 19 DX11 SLI supported games in my Steam library goodbye on using both GPU's therefore I'm only getting 1 RTX 3090 and downsizing my system to something smaller such as ITX or MATX.

 

[Krzych]

You yourself asked why they were removing SLI support from previous ones.

And let's be clear, any older games you had that benefited from SLI would not need it anymore with this One card.

Not very good at reading I see. Try again:

I don't get it. I understand that SLI is not going to be supported in future games, nobody expects that at this point, but to disable all support for existing ones?

"Existing games". Not much to do with "previous GPU generations". But whatever, let's call it a misunderstanding.

The other thing I am not even going to comment on, too much impotency in one sentence.

 

[mouacyk]

Does anyone with tweaking experience and driver experience know why NVidia is preventing implicit SLI on 3090, since it should come naturally free? Is this an artificial limitation, or is there something in Ampere that would be impossible or too much work to maintain support for implicit SLI?

 

[moob]

That's because the game is a buggy POS. But as long as people like you keep rewarding EA for their failures by buying their buggy POS games, and blaming GPU manufacturers instead of EA, EA will happily take your money and keep churning out buggy POS games. So complain elsewhere, because you're part of the problem.

...Activision publishes Warzone.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

Holy shit some of you people are dumb.

NVIDIA is not "taking SLI away" on Ampere, because SLI on Ampere was never there to begin with.



But the second card will do nothing.

Unless you have a specific game that you know implements mGPU support via a graphics API, there is no point in buying more than one RTX 3000-series card.

And the answer is equally simple, and already stated. Read it again. And do not spread FUD about NVIDIA "disabling" anything.

Also still driver errors with call of duty warzone.

That's because the game is a buggy POS. But as long as people like you keep rewarding EA for their failures by buying their buggy POS games, and blaming GPU manufacturers instead of EA, EA will happily take your money and keep churning out buggy POS games. So complain elsewhere, because you're part of the problem.

Well that didnt age well.

Call of Duty Warzone is not an EA title. Get off the high horse you seem to be on right now.

 

[Rob94hawk]

Well if they could come up with a way to utilize all the cpu's with useless integrated graphics that would be great.