SLI is really not Dead if you Have a SLI rig

[freeagent]

Vaseline vision haha. For me SLI was good for benching at the end, pretty much it. I ran SLI since nvidia gave the ok to run different brands, so for me BFG and PNY 6600GT made COD rock over 500fps lol. My last few boards have been compatible, but I do not see myself running SLI ever again. I was hitting 1000w peaks on GTX 580s lol.. my poor 850s.

 

[droopyRO]

vaseline vision TAA

what do you mean by it, that the image leaves a trail like a blur when you move the mouse, or something else ?

 

[Dragam1337]

what do you mean by it, that the image leaves a trail like a blur when you move the mouse, or something else ?

Taa can look very blurry at low resolution (1080p and below) like the entire screen was smeared in vaseline, which is true.

Solution is to either use higher res (which is always preferable anyways) or sharpening.

Turning off taa is not a solution in rdr2 imo - looks god awful.

 

[Lycanwolfen]

Upon futher testing I found yep it's dead in drivers now. I found older drivers it works but the latest ones Nvidia has disabled all SLI performance.

Sad todays games really need this technology for the RTX functions to work without DLSS.

Seems the modern days of gaming is more money. Now running two TITAN XP's but yep tested it on some of the newer games and with SLI on got less FPS vs it off.

As people have seen with the 5090 the power is just insane, melting power cords, Lack luster performance in native gaming without DLSS.

Nvidia really should rethink there whole gaming products maybe use less on one big chip and maybe something like a dual GPU card with nvlink on the same card with smaller less power hungry chips. We shall see when the 6090's come out will nvidia say card draws 1000 watts of power. Or will they re think what they are doing and start to think less power again.

Oh well the TITAN XP's at least look so cool in my case. At least some older games take full advantage of it. and at 4k 250 fps is just insane performance.

Going to wait till some prices come down to the reg price then might just bite the bullet and get a 5090 founders.

 

[mxthunder]

That SLi bridge look sick! I ran SLi Titan XPs for a while. tons of fun.
It does suck they killed it off in the drivers. with my Z490 mobo, the newest drivers for my older cards like Tesla and Fermi dont recognize the chipset as being SLI capabable (too new) so I have to stick to Z77 and Z87 chipset mobos to play with older cards in SLI.

 

[R-T-B]

I'll agree killing it off in newer drivers is kind of a dick move, but I disagree that SLI really was ever going to be longterm viable with the way graphics APIs went. DX12 and vulkan basically killed it.

 

[bitsandboots]

I recall SLI going away around the time VR came out, in which VR was never intended to be compatible with SLI. Perhaps a concern over microstutter causing motion sickness.
It'd be a stretch to say that VR killed SLI but, certainly at this time there's no reason to return to SLI.
You can use multi-GPU for productivity. You don't need it for gaming and its more trouble than its worth for gaming. I've been there and will not do it again.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Upon futher testing I found yep it's dead in drivers now. I found older drivers it works but the latest ones Nvidia has disabled all SLI performance.

Sad todays games really need this technology for the RTX functions to work without DLSS.

Seems the modern days of gaming is more money. Now running two TITAN XP's but yep tested it on some of the newer games and with SLI on got less FPS vs it off.

As people have seen with the 5090 the power is just insane, melting power cords, Lack luster performance in native gaming without DLSS.

Nvidia really should rethink there whole gaming products maybe use less on one big chip and maybe something like a dual GPU card with nvlink on the same card with smaller less power hungry chips. We shall see when the 6090's come out will nvidia say card draws 1000 watts of power. Or will they re think what they are doing and start to think less power again.

Oh well the TITAN XP's at least look so cool in my case. At least some older games take full advantage of it. and at 4k 250 fps is just insane performance.

Going to wait till some prices come down to the reg price then might just bite the bullet and get a 5090 founders.

Could you try Chernobylite on those cards, if you can?

 

[John Naylor]

Nvidia SLI is dead for the reason they did not want people to buy cheaper cards to have the same performance of a high expensive one. Also because the real hard core gamers got soft. Like in wanting the game to support it in settings.

Yes, very true .... with the 7xx and 9xx series, you could to the x80s by more than 40% sometimes for less money. It was argued at some point that it was driver related because SLI performance increases were nerfed with all with all but the top of the line cards but you still saw significant increases with the flagship. I haven't had time to game in years so have not kept up with whether anyone is even looking at this anymore. I still have a 7xx series in SLI in a 13 year old box that gets 80+ fps in Witcher 3...my son had with 970s ... they both crushed the 780 and 980.

 

[TheBlueVaron]

Nvidia SLI is dead for the reason they did not want people to buy cheaper cards to have the same performance of a high expensive one. Also because the real hard core gamers got soft. Like in wanting the game to support it in settings. That was the biggest sorta thing I have seen over the last 20 years. I run SLI and all my games support it just fine even though there is no setting in the game itself. Reminds me of when I had my voodoo2's in SLI people did not understand how it works so they never learned how to configure it. SLI can be supported is almost any game if you do it in the driver not the game. When you do it in the driver the game only see's one card. But how it reads that card is dependant on the driver how it's configured. I take a cyberpunk for an example. It says it does not support crossfire or SLI. Ok I run all my games in 4k res so this is a perfect example. I have two 1080ti's in SLI and I disabled the SLI in the driver open the game and I get average 20 fps because it's an old card duh. But when I Enable SLI and go into the driver set it to quality and SLI enabled and open cyberpunk it still only reads the one card but my FPS now has jumped to average 45 to 55 FPS in 4k. Which means its using both cards as one. Which is what SLI suppose to do. Basicly one card is runing 1080p on the bottom half and the other is rendering 1080p on the top half in the 4k setup.

Now I'm looking to upgrade my systems someday and you notice no all the motherboards only come with a single slot PCE-E. Nvidia and AMD dropped the dual cards and now Motherboard companies dropped extra PCI-E slots. Now Gamers buy a 4090 and think performance is great 130 FPS with DLSS. But DLSS is not native true gaming. It's a software patch to the AI built into the card to lower the res then scale it back to the 4k. I was a hard core gamer and for the price of a 4090 I would expect it to run native 4k without any DLSS on any game over 130 FPS.

But its does not do that. And I'm like why world I pay that money for a POS card that cannot render 4k without any DLSS and trickery.

Gamers used to demand better. Now its all about the DLSS performance and driver updates to the AI to scale down your Games then scale them up to 4k or 8k.

I might just buy two 2080TI's and Nvlink them because I quite sure I could smoke a 4090 with ease in a SLI setup.

I'm holding out though to see if Nvidia 5000 series gets back to there roots of Hard core Gamer delights.

My main question is: HOW.

I also own two Titans Xp's in SLI and I'm recently experiencing more and more issues as I keep updating my drivers and updating Windows, like, less and less games stops working and some of them act different than before. I always suspected is the forced windowed fullscreen mode that is replacing the exclusive fullscreen mode... And its strange because I'm not sure what is the problem exactly that makes one game work and then the other not, and then the other way around. Now with the launch of GTA 5 Enchanced, SLI stopped working in that game too.

I will try going back to the Windows 11 22H2 and get older drivers again (but I wonder if it will still be able to play newer games without asking me to update the drivers) to test them as in my Profile Inspector I also have many missing profiles. So, with all this said, I still really wonder what "Make the game use the two cards as one through the driver" means. I have seen this phrase in some occasions but I'm not sure what I am supposed to do to make that happen... It seems like something very convincing and functional to enjoy SLI in whatever game you want as I started with this dream of owning an SLI PC some months ago.

I would really appreciate your help.

 

[Toothless]

It's time to move on from a dead dream.

 

[TheBlueVaron]

It's time to move on from a dead dream.

I'm not asking it to you.

 

[ty_ger]

... as I started with this dream of owning an SLI PC some months ago.

You should have started having that dream 10 years ago.
SLI is dead. Officially. No one is developing for it or ensuring that it will work.

 

[freeagent]

I liked SLi.. but even I have let it go when I knowingly bought a board that no longer supports it. It was hard on PSUs anyway.

 

[GhostRyder]

I do miss the crazy setups. My last SLI/CFX rig was 3 R9 290X's on liquid in CFX. Was great for awhile but around Rise of the Tomb Raider I started noticing some issues and turning off the third card made the performance much smoother. After that I kept playing with it for along time until I kept noticing most AAA games no longer having profiles and having to jump through hoops to make 2 cards work (Let alone 3) in a way that was acceptable. After that I went to single cards, but I do miss building my rigs with multiple GPU's!

 

[kiddagoat]

My main question is: HOW.

I also own two Titans Xp's in SLI and I'm recently experiencing more and more issues as I keep updating my drivers and updating Windows, like, less and less games stops working and some of them act different than before. I always suspected is the forced windowed fullscreen mode that is replacing the exclusive fullscreen mode... And its strange because I'm not sure what is the problem exactly that makes one game work and then the other not, and then the other way around. Now with the launch of GTA 5 Enchanced, SLI stopped working in that game too.

I will try going back to the Windows 11 22H2 and get older drivers again (but I wonder if it will still be able to play newer games without asking me to update the drivers) to test them as in my Profile Inspector I also have many missing profiles. So, with all this said, I still really wonder what "Make the game use the two cards as one through the driver" means. I have seen this phrase in some occasions but I'm not sure what I am supposed to do to make that happen... It seems like something very convincing and functional to enjoy SLI in whatever game you want as I started with this dream of owning an SLI PC some months ago.

I would really appreciate your help.

They have killed SLI off in the drivers. It no longer functions. Profiles are no longer updated and maintained.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Anything DX12 has no S.L.I only mGPU & that's only if the developer even bothered to put it in with the game & put support for your cards. A game like Chernobylite doesn't even support my two RTX 2080 ti's in mGPU even though it should.

Anything with DX11 or drop back to DX11 can be forced to use both cards via the control panel selection of AFR1 or AFR2.

 

[Toothless]

I'm not asking it to you.

Doesn't matter. A single newer card will out perform your two Titans at less power draw. SLI is dead.

 

[ssj92]

Sorry if I missed it but are y'all saying SLI doesn't even work on officially supported SLI cards anymore using latest drivers?

if so does anyone know which driver is the last to support SLI?

 

[TheBlueVaron]

Doesn't matter. A single newer card will out perform your two Titans at less power draw. SLI is dead.

So, as you say SLI is dead, right? Then why are you still here yapping with the same argument everytime anyone comments about it? And this not only goes for you, but for others who also do the same. So if it's dead then why do all of you still mind? I like to use SLI in all the games that work and I want to learn more to make it work in all possible games because it can with the proper drivers and bits.

 

[TheBlueVaron]

Sorry if I missed it but are y'all saying SLI doesn't even work on officially supported SLI cards anymore using latest drivers?

if so does anyone know which driver is the last to support SLI?

There is an alive forum with active enthusiasts discussing and creating profiles for all kinds of SLI rigs and it is helping me so much with my research! Please, I recommend you visiting it, you will find tons of useful and helpful information! -https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/kozarys-quad-sli-rtx-nvlink-thread.435830/page-28#post-6298958

Regarding your question, yes. There are some SLI drivers that contain all the existing bits and also some can be more convinient than others depending in your GPU architecture. Also, the driver and the operating system have to match to make sure you will have no issues so far, I will be downgrading from Windows 11 24H2 to 22H2 and try older tesla drivers, all the games I wanted to make work didn't because I didn't have the bits, so now with this it will work!

 

[tugrul_LordOfDrinks]

If I can get better at my career, I plan on developing a game purely scalable to multiple gpus in both rendering (multiple cameras, 1 camera per screen segment) and physics (3D FFT based force calculation to use 100 million particles).

This may take 5 to 10 years. But if its completed it will be like GT1030 + RTX5090 level of freedom for scalability with any card combo and any number of cards, even the cpu will help the tasks.

The frames will be real and lower latency than 1 gpu. The engine will also support both temporal load balancing for high 0.1% frame performance and compression tech to not need high video memory and to use pcie more efficiently with no extra connection required.

---

If the above idea works, I will step up the game and run it in cloud so that 1 big chonky datacenter GPU will be able to render for 90 players at once by just reusing the same geometry data on different angles, and stream the frames to players with smart phones or whatever wearable nonsense they wear in future. This may take another 5 years.

---

Approaching to death, I want to upload my brain into datacenter and continue coding in there.

---

Some info about the game in mind:

- rpg elements, tuned for space combat, trading, smuggling, mining, bounty hunting and piracy.
- some players will be commanders and start doing strategy stuff from top-down view by clicking on other players in battle.
- players wil design their own space ships and experiment various doctrines for space combat.
- some players will just be a mayor, commanding economics of a planet.
- only 5-10 players will be supreme commanders for a few empires in the map.
- everything in the game will be destructible and explosion effects will be satisfying so people will not explode things in real life -> peace in the world
- some player classes will be about ship design, to unlock unprecedented ship optimizations for trading, hauling, mining, logistics and combat.
- players will be able to multi-class like a miner admiral, a design-master bounty-hunter, a trader smuggler or even a pirate mayor.
- the ship design will be totally modular with interiors to allow NPCs or players as crew to work inside the ship for various tasks like boarding, security, research, production, fighter fleet commanding, and even repairing the ship in combat. Yes, technician class can repair fast. Engineer class can produce fast. Scientist class can research fast.

 

[stahlhart]

It was a lot of fun back when cards were a couple of hundred dollars each. But I still cling fervently to my Aureal 3D cards, so I understand.

 

[Toothless]

So, as you say SLI is dead, right? Then why are you still here yapping with the same argument everytime anyone comments about it? And this not only goes for you, but for others who also do the same. So if it's dead then why do all of you still mind? I like to use SLI in all the games that work and I want to learn more to make it work in all possible games because it can with the proper drivers and bits.

Everyone saying it's dead is being realistic. You're really going to be hostile to people watching the end of driver support and less and less games supporting a feature that's been in decline for years? I get it, two card looks better and when it worked was amazing. That's gone. The rest of us has accepted it. The ones you're deciding to get all uppity with.

 

[tugrul_LordOfDrinks]

Just duplicate the same geometry in 2 gpus, 1 camera renders left half, 1 camera renders right half, each gpu computes its own opengl camera and renders on a texture. A third cpu thread combines two textures to have the frame. Easy peasy. Developers are developers because too lazy to do this easiy thing. Even 1.5x performance is a win. 67% latency means more smooth fps.

Problem is all games use just 1 camera. And opengl uses only 1 camera. So, use 2 contexts of opengl in different threads and render on a texture. If opengl does not work with multi context, then use vulkan or dx12.

Even windows 11 has option to change renderer gpu for opengl.