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SLI/Crossfire

jjgreenwood

jjgreenwood

jjgreenwood

Associate
Joined
21 May 2010
Posts
550
It was always the case in years gone by that you could increase your performance by adding another card. Indeed our rigs in the high end used to be characterised by having 2 watercooled graphics cards to push performance to the next level.

It seems that this has died a death in the last few years, Nvidia gave us NVlink and then seemed to kill off it's SLI program for gaming. Indeed now we are expected to spend the equivalent of 2 cards to get ever diminishing returns from 1 more powerful card. Nvidia has announced SLI will die completely in Jan 2021.

This is at odds with the early information about DX12 when we got told multi GPU would be easier, DX12 would solve many of the issues presented. Yet it seems multi GPU has become less common, rather than more common.

I'm not as familiar with crossfire but it still appears on the AMD website. In times past AMD always held the crown of the most powerful single card by putting 2 GPU on one card.

Is it likely we will see AMD return to this with Navi 2 given the rumoured power efficiency? If so what does that mean for the current Nvidia range? Can it compete with a multi GPU Navi setup? Has Nvidia essentially left the door open at the high end?
 
Nah, it's too complicated, and has the obvious downside of cost. It also causes latency issues (really hard to ensure a smooth framerate, and one GPU per eye for VR doesn't work well) and post-processing that acts across frames is problematic.

Technically it still works on the 3090, but GN just released a video on how well it works with these.

I think you can consider this horse properly flogged.
 
Problem with the DX12/Vulkan approach you can't even just implement support at engine level and leave it at that - to make it efficient it also needs tuning on a per-game basis on that engine and devs largely can't be bothered.
 
jjgreenwood said:
Seems like we all a bit depressed/negative on MGPU then. Nobody has any positive thoughts on it?
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Positive wise it looks absolutely boss in a rig. Why I still keep 3 1080Tis in main rig looks sweet :p On that gen and up to 2080Ti can get older form of SLI working okay it can be pretty great.

Evidently though with the 3090 and on AMD recent GPU side only doing explicit mGPU then it makes it largely pointless going forward. As gamers nexus did a good review there are what, a dozen or so games supporting mGPU in DX12 and Vulkan. In theory mGPU could be nice but as above it needs to be implemented on a per game basis. Devs are not going to put the effort in when on the Nvidia side at least of the new gen, only the 3090 supports it. in the grand scheme of thins only a tiny amount of people will buy a 3090 I suspect (just using steam hardware survey which shows 2080Ti at less then 1% ) let alone 2 3090's. Of course could see AMD pull something out the bag I cannot see mGPU for gaming being a high priority on devs tasks to implement.
 
I am hoping crossfire makes a comeback. AMD didn't have a high end Navi last time but now with Navi 21 the feature may be viewed as viable on high end cards..am hoping for some rudimentary support at the very least so that the community can pick it up later..
 
Nablaoperator said:
I am hoping crossfire makes a comeback. AMD didn't have a high end Navi last time but now with Navi 21 the feature may be viewed as viable on high end cards..am hoping for some rudimentary support at the very least so that the community can pick it up later..
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Based on RDNA1, doubt it, but agree would be amazing if they did to at least give consumers the option but it's 99.9% not going to happen now.
 
jjgreenwood said:
It was always the case in years gone by that you could increase your performance by adding another card. Indeed our rigs in the high end used to be characterised by having 2 watercooled graphics cards to push performance to the next level.

It seems that this has died a death in the last few years, Nvidia gave us NVlink and then seemed to kill off it's SLI program for gaming. Indeed now we are expected to spend the equivalent of 2 cards to get ever diminishing returns from 1 more powerful card. Nvidia has announced SLI will die completely in Jan 2021.
Click to expand...

It's too niche, not enough gamers do it and the cost to keep updating profiles on a per game basis is probably way too high and ultimately a loss leader. Ultimately Nvidia have said that what SLI support you will get is only what the developers of games actually add into the game itself directly, which is likely to be almost none going forward, so it's basically dead. I went with SLI 1080's because I had the chance to pick up a 2nd 1080 for cheap when the 2080 range launched, and wanted to avoid the sky high costs of those cards, and basically it was a mistake, only a handful of games gave me a benefit. When it works it's cool, GTA V scaled very well and worked like a charm for 4k, but it was a pain to manage.

I believe with changes in DX and increased bandwidth through PCI-E 4.0 we might see a move in the future towards a multi-GPU setup that's software agnostic and not need bridges but is run through the PCI-E bus instead, I'm not sure how likely that is but for any kind of sustainable and workable solution to scale rendering would need to be something like this, vendor specific implementations are like trying to ice skate up a hill.
 
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