Am I crazy? Went from SLI 1080 to single 1080Ti and it's smoother??

Sprayingmango

[H]ard|Gawd
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So I've been an SLI user for as long as SLI has been a thing. I just switched from SLI 1080s to a single Asus Strix 1080Ti because Microcenter only had one. Games feel smoother now?? For example, in the Division when switching to the map there used to be a slight stutter in the animation. It's gone now and it switches incredibly fast. There are other instances as well where there would be a slight stutter in animations and now it's gone. Wildlands is the same. Am I nuts or is it smoother with a single card???
 
This has been a given for years. SLI / Crossfire introduces microstutter due to different frame render times between cards. What you're describing sounds less like microstutter and more like SLI compatibility issues with those games (neither of which I own to test and give a second opinion). BuT yes -- given similar framerates achieved on a single card and a pair of cards, the single card will almost always feel "smoother."

It is not, however, useless or dead (though dying is not a stretch). In situations were the single fastest card available won't do what you want -- at this point in time, 4K with high settings maintaining 60FPS or higher in many titles -- then it still has a place.
 
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You probably dropped about a frame of input lag and I find many games can have less stutter with a single card. That's why I won't bother with SLI anymore. I went from a 2x970 to a single 980 Ti and am happy I made that change.

I really hope they develop something better in the future so multiple cards are a viable option again.
 
All of these are good points. I am really shocked at how all of those micro-stutter incidents impacted my gameplay. I guess I just grew to accept it as part of the game, but in reality it was due to SLI. Don't get me wrong, I love the extra horsepower that SLI provides in some instances but to me the smoothness of a single card far outweighs that now. Especially with G-sync...it's so buttery smooth and fast now!!
 
All of these are good points. I am really shocked at how all of those micro-stutter incidents impacted my gameplay. I guess I just grew to accept it as part of the game, but in reality it was due to SLI. Don't get me wrong, I love the extra horsepower that SLI provides in some instances but to me the smoothness of a single card far outweighs that now. Especially with G-sync...it's so buttery smooth and fast now!!

Same here. Considering selling 1080s for a 1080Ti. 2nd card rarely gets used and when it does the frame rates are higher but gameplay is not as enjoyable. Didn't have as many issues with 980 SLI.
 
Same here. Considering selling 1080s for a 1080Ti. 2nd card rarely gets used and when it does the frame rates are higher but gameplay is not as enjoyable. Didn't have as many issues with 980 SLI.


I was wondering the same thing...I don't recall those stutters with 980Ti SLI. Then again maybe I just didn't pay attention?
 
For games that fully support SLI baked in, SLI rocks and no single card is going to touch the performance that can be achieved with it.... however, more and more it seems that it is becoming a minoirty/fringe case as good SLI support, much less providing any SLI support at all seems to no longer be a priority for most game developers. If it is even provided, it seems it's just an afterthought now. I used to be a big proponent for SLI, but after going through four different generations of SLI (480, 680, 780Ti, 980Ti) I've watched support for it really erode over time. I finally upgrading to a single Titan XP last year, and to be honest I don't miss all the hassle. With a single card, everything just works. Not having to monkey with settings or profiles, trying to figure out why it isn't enabling, waiting for developers to fix issues, driver hassles, etc. I really don't miss this at all! So long as top tier cards can deliver the GPU performance/grunt I am after, I'll be sticking with single cards going forward.
 
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I also have 1080 SLI and I play at 3440x1440. In most games, there is a frame rate increase and it's smooth. One game in particular though that is a stuttering mess is Neverwinter online. Oddly enough, it's supposed to support SLI but my experience with it is best when I disable SLI. With SLI disabled, it's buttery smooth.

I'm seriously considering ditching SLI and going for either a 1080 TI or Titan Xp.
 
You probably dropped about a frame of input lag and I find many games can have less stutter with a single card. That's why I won't bother with SLI anymore. I went from a 2x970 to a single 980 Ti and am happy I made that change.

I really hope they develop something better in the future so multiple cards are a viable option again.

I did the same thing (2x970s to 980ti...now on 1080ti). Honestly, it was a good change, imo. SLI has too many little quirks that add up to be more annoying than it's worth. I don't think I'll ever go back to multiple cards unless the tech changes significantly.
 
I went from 660 Ti to 980 SLI a few years ago, now 1080 Ti.

Speaking strictly game performance, in the games that work, 1080 Ti is underwhelming as an upgrade imo.

Division needed custom bits for a long time, and to achieve good smoothness, you have to reign in settings more than it seems from just eyeballing your avg fps. Need medium DoF for inv. menu not to be shit for example.

Wildlands SLI ran like hot garbage in beta.

Not having to mess with bits, other quirks like no scaling after alt-tab, pre-ordering games on dev's empty promise of mgpu support, mediocre but functional when that mgpu update finally drops, high idle clocks, broken AA, no dsr + gsync for like 18 months, GFE didn't work after 3.0, etc. ...

I used to have time to tinker with it, and didn't mind. Not anymore.

From that perspective, 1080 Ti was a massive upgrade.
 
I dropped SLI after Kepler. Had a brief stint with 970 SLI before moving to a single GTX Titan X. Again, less raw framerate, but the experience was smoother and less of a hassle. Around the time Maxwell rolled around was when the writing on the wall was clear that SLI and multi GPU support in general was being dropped at an increasing rate. The thing people forget when messing around with compatibility bits is it very often causes anomalies such as missing effects and depth buffer issues. I'm happy I got out when I did.
 
I dropped SLI after Kepler. Had a brief stint with 970 SLI before moving to a single GTX Titan X. Again, less raw framerate, but the experience was smoother and less of a hassle. Around the time Maxwell rolled around was when the writing on the wall was clear that SLI and multi GPU support in general was being dropped at an increasing rate. The thing people forget when messing around with compatibility bits is it very often causes anomalies such as missing effects and depth buffer issues. I'm happy I got out when I did.


Exactly! This is something that may seem minor at first but really does disrupt the gameplay and experience. More and more I am loving a single card. The tiny stutters and graphical glitches that SLI introduced are just not worth it. With my Asus G-Sync display everything is still buttery smooth and fast. 4K would be a different story and you would probably need the raw horsepower to maintain frames...but for now at 1440P the 1080Ti is just shredding it.
 
Exactly! This is something that may seem minor at first but really does disrupt the gameplay and experience. More and more I am loving a single card. The tiny stutters and graphical glitches that SLI introduced are just not worth it. With my Asus G-Sync display everything is still buttery smooth and fast. 4K would be a different story and you would probably need the raw horsepower to maintain frames...but for now at 1440P the 1080Ti is just shredding it.

That's really it. And high Hz > 4k in my book.

I have a 1080 with a 3440x1440 21:9... I love it. Everything on high/ultra.

In the past I tried tri-fire. I also tried 1080 SLI briefly. Same experience as you.
 
I went from dual 1080s to dual 1080 Tis. People will debate but there's still a good number of games that support SLI and it's easy enough to disable with games that might cause problems. A single card does what you need then sure that's the best way to go, fastest single card one can afford. But two of those can still provide a nice lift. It just depends.
 
I experienced this smoother game play going from SLI 970s to a single 980ti with a 1500 core OC. Things just felt smoother, even though it was about a wash performance wise. I've been off SLI since - and I have had some form of SLI since my MSI Neo4 Platium with MSI 6800GTs on it.
 
I've used sli since the 8800gt days and am planning on single card next time I upgrade. I am on dual gtx 970s now, and while they perform well, I am seeing more games coming out with no support or poor support, which has me concerned.
 
I've used sli since the 8800gt days and am planning on single card next time I upgrade. I am on dual gtx 970s now, and while they perform well, I am seeing more games coming out with no support or poor support, which has me concerned.

Multi-GPU support has always been kind of iffy. The more games you play the more useful mGPU becomes but it's never been cost effective.
 
I've used sli since the 8800gt days and am planning on single card next time I upgrade. I am on dual gtx 970s now, and while they perform well, I am seeing more games coming out with no support or poor support, which has me concerned.

My only SLI setup was 2 BFG 8800GTs in a DFI LanParty SLI-DR Mobo. Oh the good times we had! We didn't have RGB back then. No we made do with UV reactive components and it was the bees knees.

Anyway yea, I'm a single card guy nowadays. The groupie multi card gaming nights are behind me.
 
My only SLI setup were 680s. Some of the games that I played utilized them fairly well but it got really old having to drop a video card just to play something without stuttering. Crossfire 290s drove me nuts after that. I finally moved onto a single 980ti and a gsync ultrawide monitor.
While my framerates struggle at times with some of the newer games it's still leaps and bounds better/smoother than any SLI or Xfire setup I've owned. I've been so pleased that I've even pre-orderd 1080ti and will stick with a single card solution for the foreseeable future.
 
My only SLI setup were 680s. Some of the games that I played utilized them fairly well but it got really old having to drop a video card just to play something without stuttering. Crossfire 290s drove me nuts after that. I finally moved onto a single 980ti and a gsync ultrawide monitor.
While my framerates struggle at times with some of the newer games it's still leaps and bounds better/smoother than any SLI or Xfire setup I've owned. I've been so pleased that I've even pre-orderd 1080ti and will stick with a single card solution for the foreseeable future.

1080Tis have been out for a while now. What do you mean pre-ordered?
 
It's simple: SLI rocks when it works, it sucks when it doesn't. That said, there are a lot of variables that impact the kind of experience you are going to have with it. Obviously, your results vary from game to game. Some games greatly benefit from the scaling, and others don't. I think people tend to exaggerate the number of titles SLI doesn't work on. I've seen more instances where it helps than the reverse. Then again, I'm not and never have used SLI at 1080P. I've used it only at extremely high resolutions and since Nehalem, I've only used it on the HEDT platforms extensively. PLX chips, CPU core count, driver revisions, and other variables may come into play with regard to smoothness in games. Additionally, some generations of NVIDIA hardware seem to handle scaling better than others. I was extremely pleased with my Maxwell based Titan X's. So far I've been less fond of the 1080Ti's. I've only really played games that didn't require the power of SLI since getting them. The only game that needs it is Mass Effect Andromeda, and it's buttery smooth with V-Sync on and never feels smooth without V-Sync on.

I'm not certain how they will behave in some other games. Only time will tell.
 
My last SLI setup was with 780 Ti cards (which I still have, shelved now) but have since moved onto a single 1080 Ti. Like heatlesssun stated earlier, I often found myself disabling SLI in some titles (World of Warships, being an example) to avoid problems I'd run into with SLI. I only game at 1440p, and that 1080 Ti seems to be working out flawlessly for me.
 
At 3840x2160, even a 1080Ti can't max out every game on it's own. SLI is a necessary evil for some games. Well, assuming its an option for a given title anyway.
 
I just replaced my two 980 SLI cards for one GTX 1080ti. Definitely a noticeable improvement in overall smoothness but subjectively, very close. I'm at 1080p but I use supersampling AA and resolution scale (I can't really justify a 4K OLED TV to replace my plasma right now at these prices). More important, my system is more stable. This is my first single GPU setup since whatever I had before the GTX590 card.

There was no need to replace the GTX 980 sli except for one thing--VRAM. If it wasn't for VRAM at 4GB, that setup would have lasted me another two years. All that processing power is useless when you only have 4GB VRAM. On the other hand, all of the VRAM I now have in a single GTX 1080 is unnecessary, because the card will run out of processing power before you can load up 11GB of vram.

Of course right after they launched GTX 980 they announced shadows of mordor would have a setting that used more than 4 GB of vram and I knew I had made a mistake.

The ultimate setup would be TWO GTX1080ti cards in SLI---because the VRAM is so excessive that you would probably have processing power and vram for several years. I mean is there any scenario that uses 11GB of vram that we could contrive? What does 4K use? In my experience SLI setups are great until the vram requirements change and then you might as well be in a Porche engine stuck in rush hour traffic.
 
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My 9600 gt's in sli ran good back in 08-09. but in the last 4-5 years support has been dropping.
 
With the release of DX12 and its support for split frame rendering, we might see multi gpu systems make a triumphant return! However, at this point, SLI/Cross can jog on.
 
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