Nvidia drops 3 and 4-way SLI mode starting with GeForce 1000 series
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DribbelDog
To be honest, this was exactly my interpretation when they told us 3 & 4 way SLI were not recommended, and would only be possible using some 'enthusiast key'. Some people appear to be surprised by this more explicit announcement, but we all saw this coming didn't we?
Also, who actually used 3 and 4 way SLI specifically for benefits in gaming scenarios? I thought >2 card support was always dodgy to begin with... It was my interpretation that the market for >2 cards was the overclockers market, which will still be able to use it. Killing support for >2 cards in games, hence being able to focus more on support for 2 cards (hopefully), seems like the right decision to me.
WhiteLightning
Moderator
heh , seems they already got too much to handle with 2 cards let alone 3 or 4.
SLI used to be so awesome when it was introduced , and look at it now. It became a joke!
Hu1kamania
Not surprising, but definitely sad. This is an end of an era for PC Hardware. I'll miss thinking about my dream rig with 4 cards in SLi, my dream will be whittled away to just two cards 🙁
I've been an SLi user since 2005, and still run SLi today. It's a great technology, but it's potential has never been fully realized. 3 and 4 way support has been waning for a long time, and the new CPU's lack the PCIe lanes for a full x16 setup with 3 and 4 cards, so I get it.
Hu1kamania
As I recall, we started seeing struggles with SLi when they introduced gpu based physics (physX), and later technologies like Gsync, and DSR. Getting that stuff to work together across 4 GPU's seemed to be more trouble than it was worth.
RzrTrek
I suppose scaling always was an issue.
Cave Waverider
Does AMD still support three and four way Crossfire for their new hardware? It might be a good idea to fill a niche Nvidia has given up on.
holler
uh, multi-GPU is not going away. Just the old Nvidia SLI implementation of it. DX12 and Vulkan MGPU is making SLI and Crossfire as we know it obsolete. if anything we will see greater then 3 and 4 cards in the future...
Even with the old implementation, I got great scaling in the battlefield games, with my 3 way 290x setup. Overwatch scales pretty well too. close to 100%.
Prior to that I had a 4-way GTX 480 setup, nividia scaling was not as good as crossfire imho, so not really surprised they dropped support...
Denial
You can still do 3-4 way MGPU in MDA games that support it.
The scaling in AFR is terrible though and newer games are using techniques that completely kill MGPU in AFR mode. I'd rather them kill it and inform people why then just let people buy it in half supported anti-scaling limbo like it has been.
Reddoguk
If two cards can produce the desired fps then i suppose no one would care that much about losing 3way & 4way sli.
The 1080 has been shown to be able to hit those high numbers depending on resolution of course but in the mainstream 1080p/1440p then 1080's are more than enough.
The problem is that three 1070's could beat two 1080's while being a cheaper alternative. So nVidia might be shooting itself in the foot but only for a small percentage of power users/enthusiasts.
It's still to be seen whether someone can buy two cards that out perform a much high level card.
Maybe in the near future i could get 8gb 1060Ti's sli'd to match a single 1080 for less cost. Only time will tell.
Kaarme
People with more than 2 video cards use their rig for cracking passwords or mining bitcoin. I'm sure they won't be affected.
icedman
I believe the cards in the picture are gtx 480's.
And I say good decision just getting 2 way slightly to work sometimes was a nightmare worked ok on my 2 460's but my 2 670's sucked tho that may have been my fault with modified bios'
Shadowdane
SLI started to become a big issue... with the advent of all the post processing effects that have appeared in games over the past 4-5 years.
A lot of these post effects cause conflicts with SLI configurations, hence why we've seen a decline in SLI over the years. Now with DX12 shifting SLI more toward the developer, I bet we see it decline further. The only way I could see it making a big comeback if somehow a console adds a dual-GPU configuration. I really don't see that happening anytime soon if at all.
I'm still planning to do 2-way SLI for the 1080... but honestly after that I might go back to 1 card if Nvidia really steps things up for the 1100 series.
TheDeeGee
They gave up for a reason.
Highly doubt AMD can do any better.
scheherazade
I'm a long time SLI user.
I've had nearly zero issues with either 3dfx or nvidia in sli.
A few minor issues with ati, but they were fixed in a timely manner via driver updates.
Overall, I find it an excellent experience that I wouldn't want to give up.
Maybe I'm lucky, maybe it's pebkac, maybe whatever. In any case, I love me some sli.
-scheherazade
Matt26LFC
Couldn't care less, next upgrade for me is single GPU all the way 🙂
Aura89
The cards in the picture are definitely 4-way SLI GTX 480s
Xuanzang
Maybe in near future we will see motherboards physically restricted to only 2 cards in SLI. And maybe there will be a small number of motherboards that will allow for more than x2 cards, but at a much much higher price.
LesserHellspawn
I went tri-SLI with my rig and have zero issues with it. This is just darn stupid. I know and accept that a third card gives only diminishing returns and a 4th does hardly anything. But for me 3 is the sweet spot. One less reason for me to upgrade then, as 3 980ti don't do worse than 2 1080. The only thing is far lower power consumption, but then again measure that against the initial purchase costs.
Denial
Except it's going to get progressively worse as time goes on and newer games come out. At what point is it not worth Nvidia investing tons of man hours in for something that is completely out of their control? At what point do you just let consumers blindly buy cards for a technology that's nearly unsupportable?
2+ cards still work in MDA games, if or when they ever come out. If you still want 3 cards, you can still get them and they will still be usable in some regard.
scheherazade
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
