Nvidia drops 3 and 4-way SLI mode starting with GeForce 1000 series

I would love a more robust ribbon connection between GPUs.

Have them interconnect at a lower level - pooling their memory and shader units into one logical GPU.

Treat the SLI bridge like a hypertransport bus between CPUs.

-scheherazade

 

good riddance!

Great! 3-4 way setups are irrelevant to 99.9% of users(no offense to the .1% people on this forum. In the past I've had both SLI and Crossfire setups(hell, I even had 3DFX SLI way back when). Both times it was what was convenient and cheap. Both times there were issues(for me more issues with Crossfire). While it was "kind of cool" to have 2(SLI) or 3(Crossfire) GPUs, it was always inferior to the performance of newer single GPU setups. I'm glad to see the focus on real world setups, not benchmarking rigs that don't actually play any games.

 

As other said, maybe this is only the "demise" of SLI, but super multi-gpu will find its way through other means with DX12/Vulkan, I don't know. Either way, I would never had gone over 2 GPUs in SLI... and I had 3 rigs with SLI.

 

3 way was very limited use and 4 way was only benchmarkers used in specific tests that supported it.While they won't be happy over all it's not even a blip really in sales.

 

When I had my tri 660 ti setup every game worked like ...... wow awesome!!!!.
However I have seen a shift in engines, most of the new 3d engines arent sli or crossfire happy. So im guessing for the simple life they are scaling things down. I am however confused that the CPU cores are increasing and the gpu part is decreasing to almost single cards like a console. Which is almost more confusing to the point that they introduced multi gpu years ago to then abandon it. arrrrg im sticking to my android phone lol

 

Finally, now i don't have to envy those 3-4 SLI fools.

 

even with 2 card AMD have issues despite Xfire is more technological than SLi with more than 2 it is a dead end

i don't know if they need to go this way, don't you think?

 

Hi all!
This is what I calling of "Respect to Customers"
All know that the third and fourth cards are a lost of money...
Even with two cards the real gain of performance is no more than 70%.
Great decision of Nvidia and I think that the market will follow it too...

 

many game engines support SLI/Crossfire fine, with great scaling.

some others CHOOSE not too, mostly because they only really cared about the console/mobile space since its easier to make money there. You can't blame the technology for game engine developers short-sightedness/laziness.... post processing effects can work just fine in SLI mode.

 

Arguable.

Newer shader based effects use previous frame data to calculate next frame data. Utilizing these techniques can provide significant performance boosts to single card setups at the expense of completely losing AFR without a workarounds. These workarounds get even more complex when you are running more than 2 cards.

If you're in a position to increase single card performance by 10-15% at the expense of losing 3-4 way SLI support, why the hell would you chose the 3-4 SLI group? You're effectively hampering performance for the vast majority of users to benefit a select few.

Further, DX12 supports explicit MDA which will render AFR obsolete anyway, especially once the large engines get behind it. All the compute/prior frame data shader problems go out the window as the developer can designate a card to render specific shaders. 3-4 card setups can function under Explicit MDA regardless to what Nvidia is supporting, as long as the developer supports it.

It's a waste of Nvidia's time to support 3-4 way SLI, it's a waste of developer time to attempt to work around previous frame data shader problems with AFR, it's a waste of customers money to use 3-4 way SLI and it's a potential waste of performance on single card setups to throw out newer shading techniques.

 

Basically what Nvidia is saying is that they drop 3-4-way as DX12/Vulkan should work 2-way out of the box? :banana:

 

Never should have. Be glad you saved your money instead of wasting it for minimal return benefit. lol

 

I figured this as much because there really hasn't been not much upgrade difference between 2 and 3 way SLI and 3 to 4 way SLI. There have been situations where consumers lost some performance with more than 2 cards.

 

Like I sad, the REAL increase performance from the many SLI and Crossfire tests here at Guru3D the average is 70%.

In the 1080 SLI tests only one game get 88%. The average was lower than 70%.

In the end, its a really lost of money!

 

While I'm not really interested in anything nVidia makes, I have to agree with their reasoning here. 3&4-way Xfire/SLI was always about diminishing returns on performance, anyway, and with d3d12 game engines on the horizon (that don't simply "support" d3d12 hardware to some limited extent, but actually require it), lots of things are changing with respect to dual-GPU support that preclude 3-4 GPU support. One of the coolest, I think, is being able to address the ram on both cards independently so that two 4GB cards = 8GBs of video ram addressable by the game--or two 8GB cards - 16GB's of addressable vram in the d3d12 games that support that d3d12-exclusive feature. No more of having to copy the Vram of the first card into the second GPU to use both GPUs. That will still be possible...of course, for older d3d11 and earlier games, but newer game engines will be able to work the d3d12 vram magic with a pair of GPUs. Everything about xFire/SLI is changing.

 

Now here is something for AMD to brag about and take advantage of... Lol! I see this coming how they brag about 3 and 4 way x fire... Hahaha!

 

Will this mean more games will support 2 way?

 

It's interesting to see all NVidia fans, so delighted with abandoning tri- and quad- SLI by NVidia. Shouldn't you maybe, ask for some more similar moves?

 

Well from my experience, Crossfire has usually scaled a bit better than SLI especially in setups with more than two cards and generally worked with more games than SLI in the past couple of years, with the exception of windowed games that Crossfire doesn't even support while SLI does. So I'd assume they can do a bit better.
I'm just thinking that AMD could keep up the support to adopt that niche.

Then again, it might just not make much sense. I've had multi GPU setups from various manufactures for as long as they've been available and before last year was able to get most games to utilize multiple GPUs well with a bit of tweaking here and there. Due to so many games having problems to work with multi GPU setups these days, be it SLI or Crossfire, however, I wouldn't go for a multi card solution anymore nowadays and just go with the single most powerful card I can get for my money's worth instead if I was to upgrade one of my systems.

However, I can definitely see the benefits of multi GPU for multi monitor systems at high resolutions, if I was to go that route, I'd want such a setup if no single card is powerful enough to drive thoses properly yet.

I wish AMD could top Nvidia considerably in single card performance at a much lower price so Nvidia would have to adjust as well and launch their actual top-end products for decent prices instead of medium ones for above top-end prices. With actual competition, we'd get more performance for a lower price for both brands, which would be great for the consumer.

 

Damn, that sucks. Could go 4 x Fury Xfire without bridges because awesome, but totally unecessary.