Nvidia kills 3x and 4x SLI with Pascal *spawn*

So, 2-way with new bridges only, and that's the 2x bandwidth. Did I win a cake?

 

Honestly, if NVIDIA did kill 3/4-way SLI, I'd consider that a good thing. This kind of stuff probably requires a highly unreasonable amount of development effort that could be much better spent elsewhere.

 

According to Jay 3/4 way Sli is still supported through a bios update



But probably only usable for benchmarking

 

The only unreasonable thing is the presence of the SLI bridges...

 

According to who? Who is that guy? Never heard of him before AFAIK, am I to treat him as an authority on the subject?

 

Don't know about his sources, but according to NVIDIA those modes are still supported, even though it takes extra steps

That's from GTX 1080 whitepaper

 

That reads a lot like,

We're no longer going to be putting in any driver development work into 3 or 4 way SLI. We realize that some people may still want to use it regardless of this, so we'll give you a way to enable it. Good Luck. It may still provide some level of scaling, possibly even good scaling, but don't hold your breath.

IMO, a prudent and practical thing to do. Scaling beyond 2 cards tends to fall off quite rapidly in the vast majority of cases anyway. As well, the future of multi-GPU isn't SLI, IMO, but instead developers implementing in their engine something that works best for their game or using a middle-ware engine that provide MGPU support. I imagine Nvidia will hang onto SLI bridges and whatnot for as long as they can, but it'll hopefully die at some point. Once AFR isn't the de-facto way to utilize multiple GPU's I may actually look into MGPU again.

Regards,
SB

 

Jay is a PC enthusiast that has been running tri-sli configuration on his rig for at least the past three generations of Nvidia GPUs, his source is Nvidia directly. He talks about the enthusiast key too. I expect game support to be just as good as previous tri/quad sli support (i.e. not great) but at least it can still be used for 3DMark and bragging rights, i guess

 

So AMD gets rid of multi-gpu bridges with XDMA crossfire with Hawaii and nVidia wants you to use both bridges for 2 gpus doubling the bandwidth available.
Hmm.

 

Makes sense, doesn't it?

 

>50£$€ per bridge, yes it makes sense..

 

Don't forget that it'll also happily work on x4 PCIE lanes (x16 slot) whereas Nvidia requires at least x8, I believe, AND still requires the SLI bridges.

Regards,
SB

 

While presenting better scalability in general.

 

Has there ever been any benchmarks for GPU to GPU copying for SLI vs crossfire, bridge vs no bridge, etc? When VR-SLI first went into beta there were some community tests that seemed to show the inter-card bandwidth could be taxed as the eye buffer size scaled up (8x/8x vs 16x/16x SLI seemed to produce noticeable performance differences as the buffers got larger). With VR every millisecond accounts for ~11% of your total available frame time, so it's much more bandwidth sensitive than a heavily pipeline AFR mode.

 

Inter-card bandwidth is not about 3DMark scores or doubling Fps rates, but for direct and low-latency communication between the display engines, i.e. to achieve low-variance frametimes.

 

Comment from PCPer on 3/4-Way SLI on Pascal ...

http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/GeForce-GTX-1080-and-1070-3-Way-and-4-Way-SLI-will-not-be-enabled-games

 

So pretty much dead and killed except for benchmark wars.

 

What about multi-monitor?