Can someone explain the state of SLI to me?

[Rasseru]

I've just had a refresh of system after a long hiatus, and wow, a few things have shocked me.

One of them is SLI being borked. What happened? I bought a 1080 with the presumption was that I could just whack another 1080 in, and SLI my new 4K screen.

Apparently not. Can someone give me a laymans rundown on wtf happened to lovely SLI?

 

[Rasseru]

Well i've got the 4K screen, and some games just need a little extra... I think i'll wait until the amd & nv throw the next punches.


edit* hmm a cheaper 1080 is so tempting! trying to work out if its worth it

 

[Rasseru]

Not used SLI since the Titan X Maxwell and I detested it for a couple of reasons. One being that pretty much all of my games had microstutter. I only noticed it after going G-Sync mind but once seen, it can't be unseen, so if you are susceptible to it like me, it is a no no. The other thing was SLI just wasn't working in newer games or when it was working, was barely giving me more frames over a single card. I have also noticed that this is only getting worse with more and more developers ignoring mGPU users and focusing on single card users.

That would drive me insane..

 

[Rasseru]

Biggest issue though I found lately is that the newer games where you don't really need more than a 970 or more recently 1070 to get great framerates support multi GPU fine with like 70+% scaling and the games where you could really do with multi GPU to top off the framerate have issues with it either not working at all, poor scaling or other things like stutter or rendering problems.

Its weird, me coming back to PC gaming recently, and finding lots of things that worked 5+ years ago are now broken! Why does that even happen, I cant see a reason for it

 

[Rasseru]

Because for the vast majority of people SLI is simply no longer a requirement.

ah yeah, due to 1080p.. right.

What about things like stereo 3d going from any res/hz combo to being locked at 1080p/24hz in the driver. That has me scratching my head headbutting the desk. 3D was always scaleable for 10+ years, and then got gimped. seriously, 24hz & no higher than 1080p. who made that decision and why? They literally didnt need to change anything and instead they decided to make it worse. WHYY

 

[Rasseru]

What setup is that? - 3D Vision still allows higher than 1080p and upto 120Hz. I know with TVs you are often limited to 1080p 24Hz or 720p 60Hz but its always been that way on TVs.

Ah right, gotcha. Yes it is a TV, but that will also support 4k 60hz 3D with a hack, which most cant get to work (including me). its really annoying! If I could only run nvidia control panel and change the hz to 60 it would work ok. I dont know who is to blame but an unlockedhz setting could be achieved in the driver, which they wont.

Single cards are strong enough now until we get any major graphical leaps

not for me in 4k they arent :/