Has anyone got a 2nd 1080ti for SLI?

[tyler_jrb]

With new hi spec monitors on the horizon and ever more demanding games being launched mGPU going forward is the only solution.

If some one wants to play the latest game on a 144htz 2160p monitor (when they are available) not even a top of the range Volta Titan will be able to do the job or even get anywhere close.

It depends on your preferences I guess. If you don't mind lowering a few settings and disabling AA for example then it's totally possible. Lets face it at 4K AA makes little difference and high-ultra on most games is also minuscule.

However yes, no card for the next gen or two will be able to max 4K 144hz with all the eye candy.

SLI is brilliant when it works but when started getting worse fps than a single card, that's when I got fed up and ditched it, I'd rather just tune a few settings.

 

[Kaapstad]

It depends on your preferences I guess. If you don't mind lowering a few settings and disabling AA for example then it's totally possible. Lets face it at 4K AA makes little difference and high-ultra on most games is also minuscule.

However yes, no card for the next gen or two will be able to max 4K 144hz with all the eye candy.

SLI is brilliant when it works but when started getting worse fps than a single card, that's when I got fed up and ditched it, I'd rather just tune a few settings.

Demands on the next gen are only going to increase, AMD and NVidia will not be able to keep up by using ever smaller nodes.

I have already mentioned 4K 144htz but there are other techs on the horizon too like VR, 8K etc.

Ultimately AMD/NVidia/Games industry are going to have to get their fingers out and find a way of getting mGPU to work well as it is the way forward.

In the future we could have systems with dozens of small GPUs all working together rather than a single very big hot and inefficient core.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

If you just want to benchmark then fire away!

Yep, I've got 4 * 780 Classified's (I got one from you IIRC actually it was Boomstick) for SLI benching, but I wouldn't dream of going through the frustration of gaming with 2 of them let alone 4.

It baffles me why Nvidia and developers aren't more supportive of SLI. It is literally costing Nvidia millions

I'm not so sure, mate. We are enthusiasts and see it from our perspective, but the majority of PC gamers are at 1080p 60Hz therefore have no further need for SLI systems now.

 

[ToTheMax]

Could AMD pull something out of the bag using their new interconnect fabric and make mGPU transparent to developers?

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Could AMD pull something out of the bag using their new interconnect fabric and make mGPU transparent to developers?

They're struggling to make any GPU available to consumers, let alone mGPU available to developers. Their focus appears to have switched to CPU's where they are making decent headway.

 

[Raiden85]

For games that do support SLI I have has no issues at all with 2x 1080 Ti's. At 4k with the setting I play at 1x 1080 Ti isn't enough unfortunately, did try GTA 5 and The Division with a single card and it struggled to maintain 60fps, with two cards 4k at ultra is silky smooth with plenty of power to spare.

SLI support has been a pain in the ass for the last few years but I have no regrets running two cards, and when the game does support it properly it runs great.

 

[CaptainRAVE]

With such a powerful single card solution available and having had so many issues with multi gpu setups I can't see myself ever going back.

 

[JediFragger]

With such a powerful single card solution available and having had so many issues with multi gpu setups I can't see myself ever going back.

I do love how it's just run and play with no issues

If you're a nvidia fan then a Ti + Gsync is where it's at!!!

 

[CaptainRAVE]

I do love how it's just run and play with no issues

If you're a nvidia fan then a Ti + Gsync is where it's at!!!

Agreed. I should have switched years ago.

Currently have freesync, but fortunately 144hz.

 

[LeMson]

We do seem to be running away monitor wise, 4k, then dell 5k, now 8k, and high hz 4k

 

[JediFragger]

We do seem to be running away monitor wise, 4k, then dell 5k, now 8k, and high hz 4k

It's called progress.

 

[Mysterae_]

Nvidia's current disregard for SLI must be costing them sales for sure. I'm a prime example - I currently have 980Ti SLI and a Predator G-Sync monitor; I wanted to 'upgrade' to 1080Ti but one wouldn't feel like much of an upgrade with SLI'd games I ran at the time with my 980Ti's. Two 1080Ti's is a ridiculous amount of money for an unpredictable number of future games that may or may not support it.

So I stuck with my 980Ti's in the meantime.

It's clearly Nvidia's (and AMD's) fault. They should make the mGPU technology implementable with next to no effort from the games developer. Even if it's slightly difficult games developers ditch it because their time, costs and resources are stretched thin as it is. Top-tier mGPU arrangements are quite rare due to the cost and the game devs will concentrate on the features that favour the many, not the few. It's up to the hardware vendors to make multi-GPU performance palatable again.

 

[LeMson]

It's called progress.

True yes, but take 8k with the bells on, vega and volta better kick ass, cos we have pulled away from tri and quad sli, waxing and waning on the progress is a bit ******

 

[Legend]

I'm not so sure, mate. We are enthusiasts and see it from our perspective, but the majority of PC gamers are at 1080p 60Hz therefore have no further need for SLI systems now.

Totally agree, we are in the minority, be the potential market for SLI is still worth millions, so it seems daft for Nvidia to not want to tap in to this. Granted, most gamers will happily chug along at 1080p with a single card, and even if SLI scaled at 100% they wouldn't be interested, but there would literally be no downside to Nvidia pushing it. Makes no sense to me, but I don't see things changing anytime soon. I'm sure the situation is more complex than I'm aware of... obviously developers need to play ball, and what's in it for them? They'd need to be incentivised, plus the whole console situation further complicates things.

 

[CaptainRAVE]

If it was economically viable I am sure it would be tapped into.

 

[El_MUERkO]

I went from SLI 980's to a single 1080. Not touching the TI's, maybe nVidia and AMD will up their game with the next generation of cards.

 

[Legend]

If it was economically viable I am sure it would be tapped into.

Well that's the big question, because I don't possibly see how selling thousands more GPUs is not a plus for Nvidia... so there must be something else going on here. Whether it's the developers not co-operating, or some limitation with newer game engines... who knows, but it's not even new games/engines, as even within existing games, we're seeing SLI once working well, then becoming a buggy mess after driver updates. Something has happened that's seen support for it almost forgotten, and some may even argue deliberately sabotaged! Could simply be that consoles are to blame though. I don't know if this question has been put directly to Nvidia, but I'd like to know what they have to say on the matter.

 

[ToTheMax]

Well that's the big question, because I don't possibly see how selling thousands more GPUs is not a plus for Nvidia... so there must be something else going on here. Whether it's the developers not co-operating, or some limitation with newer game engines... who knows, but it's not even new games/engines, as even within existing games, we're seeing SLI once working well, then becoming a buggy mess after driver updates. Something has happened that's seen support for it almost forgotten, and some may even argue deliberately sabotaged! Could simply be that consoles are to blame though. I don't know if this question has been put directly to Nvidia, but I'd like to know what they have to say on the matter.

I would say DX12 happened, a small subset of game devs said they wanted low level access to GPU. This invalidated the driver abstraction layer SLI relied upon and now devs have to code specific routines to support mGPU which just isn't worth it given the shrinking subset of users still using SLI.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

My understanding is that decent SLI support would mean £££'s for Nvidia, but it's the developers that need to allocate the resources to make the software compatible. The game developers don't care how many GPUs Nvidia sell.

 

[ArmitageShanks]

Well that's the big question, because I don't possibly see how selling thousands more GPUs is not a plus for Nvidia... so there must be something else going on here. Whether it's the developers not co-operating, or some limitation with newer game engines... who knows, but it's not even new games/engines, as even within existing games, we're seeing SLI once working well, then becoming a buggy mess after driver updates. Something has happened that's seen support for it almost forgotten, and some may even argue deliberately sabotaged! Could simply be that consoles are to blame though. I don't know if this question has been put directly to Nvidia, but I'd like to know what they have to say on the matter.

It's mainly the game engines that used deferred rendering for the fancy shading and lighting effects that rely on previous frame data from what I understand. Doing something like alternate frame rendering in SLI would make these optimisations useless, hence there's a reluctance to work around it for a very small portion of the gaming market.

I'm hoping VR will slowly renew interest in SLI again, especially when it comes to providing a consistent 90+ FPS at increasing resolutions. Having one GPU-per-eye effectively removes any interframe dependencies that might exist with a single display.