RIP - SLI - You were a neat thing

[xSOSxHawkens]

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/315164-dual-gpu-gaming-gives-up-the-ghost-as-nvidia-ends-sli-support

Seems its done for. The Voodoo is sad...

[-=SOF=-WID99]

saw that too over on guru 3d

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/nvidia-ends-sli-support-and-is-transitioning-to-native-game-integrations-(read-terminated).html

still have my old SLI based card a voodoo 5 5500 in a box some where .. with an old P3 033 driving it .. was the best dual GPU on a card i ever bought ..so yea its time for SLI to die out , as its no longer used by many games

we knew it was coming with the end of 3dfx years ago tho and nvidia beating the hell out of the voodoo 5 cards with the GTS and old geforce 2 series cards once Nvidia bought 3dfx

end of an era for sure

i may have to pull out that old system this weekend and retro play some old games / offline of course since it still has win 98 SE on it

[-=SOF=-WID99]

and again Microsoft stepped an with Mgpu ..that alone killed SLI years ago

and even with SLI enabled you only had use of a single cards video memory

the vid memory does not stack in SLI

[_I_]

vooodoo gen sli used sli the right way (both gpus rendered half the scene and interleaved their frames to create the entire frame) and supported by the gpu driver and api to work with any dx/ogl/glide game/program
pci-e sli was never correctly implemented (they share workload and clone vram to create the frames)
and only works with a few games and other programs
good riddance to pci-e sli again (about the third time they said they would drop it)

[-=SOF=-WID99]

_I_ の投稿を引用：

vooodoo gen sli used sli the right way (both gpus rendered half the scene and interleaved their frames to create the entire frame) and supported by the gpu driver and api to work with any dx/ogl/glide game/program
pci-e sli was never correctly implemented (they share workload and clone vram to create the frames)
and only works with a few games and other programs
good riddance to pci-e sli again (about the third time they said they would drop it)

nailed it in that post sir ...

[[☥] - CJ -]

DX12 Mixed GPU games can use SLI/XFire without needing a bridge
So games like Ashes of the Singularity would be able to be benchmarked with 2 3080s for example to get an idea of how they may do if they actually allowed SLI

Thats how i see it anyway

[XxzodazZ]

The only reason I still see it to be of any use to anyone,is If they want to slap a few or 4 old used cards together on an older oc'd system and play games that are happy w multiple Gpu

[nullable]

I mean SLI had like 16 years to catch on. The number of people who ever used it was pretty small at any one time. People liked the idea of it. But it rarely made sense to buy two midrange GPU's over a single highend GPU. It usually didn't make much sense to upgrade by adding a second GPU for SLI, as the the next generation hardware would usually be better than the previous SLI setup, and be a little more consistent being a simpler configuration. It was really only ever a enthusiast solution in practice and even then enthusiasts weren't piling on board.

It's just not the solution we all wanted it to be.

[xSOSxHawkens]

I think the biggest issue it faced was the VRAM limit.

Back in the day when it had decent scaling the issue generally was that next gen had more VRAM and did better due to that alone.

EG - The GTX-295 is *faster* in dual GPU rendering than a GTX-650-2GB card. In anything that stays under 1GB VRAM the 295 pushes a decent chunk ahead of the multi-generation newer card (with SLI working). But even in SLI supported titles, once the VRAM limit goes near 1GB demand the 295 poops itself hard.

If the 295 made full use of the VRAM instead of mirroring it then it would perform just as fast if not faster.

Thats just a singular example from hardware I personal own and have tested, but the example runs along most of the SLI/CFX history. Even when the pervious gen SLI setup had the raw render power, it was normally outclassed in other ways (api, VRAM, etc). Mirrored memory was a killer.

I was super excited for DX12 and its mutli-GPU ability. Even more so after the early testing using mixed setups, where it was seen that AMD Primary + NV Secondary tended to offer the most amazing results (the type of setup I would love to use). And with the VRAM not needing to be mirrored anymore...

Sadly I dont think devs will work much at all to support such features :/

[xSOSxHawkens]

-=SOF=-WID99 の投稿を引用：

i may have to pull out that old system this weekend and retro play some old games / offline of course since it still has win 98 SE on it

Not much in the wild for a 9x machine anymore. They are actually far more safe I would say for an average user to be connected to the net on than anything XP, or arguably even 7.

Not that 9x is secure, its not. Just that the numbe rof active attacks in the wild for XP and 7 dwarf anything still left active for 9x... Even if the machine caught something who knows if the listening server would even be alive anymore lol.

Bigger issue would be getting pages loaded at all. If all you are just going for some games then the networking backsides for them are likely just fine to use ;)

[Illusion of Progress]

I'd add cost to the list of reasons. With single GPU prices going up over the last decade, namely on nVidia's side, it didn't help with the prospect of diminishing returns or something seldom supported.

[Andrius227]

I tried it, with 2x gtx980’s, and it sucked. Hardly any games supported it, and the ones that did, had micro stuttering, or terrible scaling... Im not gonna miss it...

Was a cool idea tho. Buying a second top end gpu when one was not enough seemed cool. It just didnt work.

[Napoleonic S]

Funny, one multi GPU solution died before another multi GPU solution about to start.

When will Nvidia Hopper comes out? Next year isn't it?