GeForce GTX 1080 2-way SLI review - Introduction

GeForce GTX 1080 2-way SLI (preliminary review)

Two weeks ago we had a peek at the GeForce GTX 1080, this round however we bring in the big guns, as in plural. We will arm our big daddy PC rig with not one, but two GeForce GTX 1080 cards and zoom in at SLI performance for the GeForce GTX 1080. In this review we'll run the standard benchmarks, but we will also have an even closer look at Ultra HD gaming performance as well as a micro stuttering analysis with the help of FCAT.

Before we start please read this a HUGE note; this will be article is revision one. The early 368.25 driver does not seem to support SLI for the majority of games, hence we'll look at a handful of games in this preliminary revision of the article first, once a proper final SLI supporting driver is out, we'll add the rest okay ? So this is us jumping the gun to push some results out, not blaming Nvidia.

We will be looking at performance from a single monitor point of view, so ideally with so much horsepower a Wide Quad HD resolution (2560x1440) is the monitor resolution where you should start (but preferably Ultra HD of course). You will notice great performance increases with 2-way SLI as the cards scale nicely with so much horsepower, but in certain scenarios will have a bit more scaling issuesas well sure. While Full HD (1920x1080/1200) and WHQL (2560x1440) have become the industry standard within the display industry, enthusiasts will never settle for just the 'standard' and are always looking for the next big innovation in technology. Ultra HD gaming is exactly that, the next evolution in immersion that gamers have been waiting for. Commonly addressed as Ultra HD, UHD or 4K, this new resolution refers to the ultra-high resolutions with approximately 4000 horizontal pixels. Ultra HD resolution also has four times the number of pixels of a typical 1920x1080 resolution. It will be interesting to find out how the GeForce GTX 1080 cards will handle such extreme resolutions. Considering its nice 8 GB framebuffer. With UHD (Ultra High Definition Gaming) becoming rapidly popular we'll test multiple multi-GPU setups on such a monitor. Next to that we'll perform FCAT tests to see where how the card behaves anno 2016 in terms of micro-stuttering and frame pacing.

Join us in this review where we'll once again look at everything. As if you figured just one card would be interesting.