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

[CSI PC]

Source please?

There is a firmware key one can apply for to unlock beyond 2xHB SLI.
I do wonder if the same firmware key is required for the standard 2xSLI (not 3/4).... Yeah logically this would be stupid to run for work/games but from a technical perspective will be interesting to know whether it requires a firmware to change operation between HB and traditional SLI.
Point would be to prove whether the key is just an unlock or actual technical framing-signalling difference also done with the firmware.

Cheers

 

[Alessio1989]

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

 

[Alexko]

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.

 

[Kaotik]

Source please?

 

[Clukos]

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

But probably only usable for benchmarking

 

[Alessio1989]

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.

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

 

[Grall]

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

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

 

[Kaotik]

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

Enthusiast Key
While NVIDIA no longer recommends 3 or 4 way systems for SLI, we know that true enthusiasts will not be swayed…and in fact some games will continue to deliver great scaling beyond two GPUs. For this class of user we have developed an Enthusiast Key that can be downloaded off of NVIDIA’s website and loaded into an individual’s GPU. This process involves:
1. Run an app locally to generate a signature for your GPU
2. Request an Enthusiast Key from an upcoming NVIDIA Enthusiast Key website
3. Download your key
4. Install your key to unlock the 3 and 4-way function
Full details on the process are available on the NVIDIA Enthusiast Key website, which will be available at the time GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs are available in users’ hands.

That's from GTX 1080 whitepaper

 

[Silent_Buddha]

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

 

[Clukos]

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

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

 

[Moloch]

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.

 

[CarstenS]

Makes sense, doesn't it?

 

[Alessio1989]

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

 

[Silent_Buddha]

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.

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

 

[Deleted member 13524]

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.

While presenting better scalability in general.

 

[hughJ]

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.

 

[CarstenS]

While presenting better scalability in general.

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.

 

[Deleted member 2197]

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

IMPORTANT UPDATE: After writing this story, but before publication, we went to NVIDIA for comment.
As we were getting ready to publish, the company updated me with a shift in its stance on multi-GPU configurations. NVIDIA will no longer require an "enthusiast key" to enable SLI on more than two GPUs. However, NVIDIA will also only be enabling 3-Way and 4-Way SLI for a select few applications .
As we were getting ready to publish, the company updated me with a shift in its stance on multi-GPU configurations. NVIDIA will no longer require an "enthusiast key" to enable SLI on more than two GPUs. HOWEVER, NVIDIA thus will only be enabling 3-Way and 4-Way SLI for a select few applications.
More details are at the bottom of the story!

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

 

[BRiT]

So pretty much dead and killed except for benchmark wars.

 

[Deleted member 2197]

So pretty much dead and killed except for benchmark wars.

What about multi-monitor?