Anyone running SLI these days with 10xx cards?

I'll hold here until 1180Ti drops. My only issue is I do not feel like replacing my three monitors I use for nSurround. I am successfully using active display port adapters at the moment, it just doesn't hit full 120 FPS like native DVI-D did with the trip 780's, high 90's on the side monitors. I don't notice it much when playing WoW.

I was in a similar situation when I went from 3 GTX 680s to two 1080s a couple of years ago and for DVI to DP converters. Worked ok for 2D but still a big of flakiness with flicker and such. 3D was busted and I still use that for movies and on the care occasion a game. Replaced my 120hz 3D Alienware monitors with the Asus ones in my sig and it just works much better, no flakiness, 3D works fine. I spent like $250 on those adapters, should have just replaced the monitors. Never had a lot of luck with video plug adapters, never really dealing with those again unless there's a good reason.
 
i still like SLI/Crossfire for the reliability standpoint, especially now on a Ryzen setup. when a GPU dies, you got a second backup still in place. this allows you time to hunt a better deal, or more recently, wait for prices to return to sanity. less of an issue when buying new, but those of us always picking up used, it does make since.
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I was in a similar situation when I went from 3 GTX 680s to two 1080s a couple of years ago and for DVI to DP converters. Worked ok for 2D but still a big of flakiness with flicker and such. 3D was busted and I still use that for movies and on the care occasion a game. Replaced my 120hz 3D Alienware monitors with the Asus ones in my sig and it just works much better, no flakiness, 3D works fine. I spent like $250 on those adapters, should have just replaced the monitors. Never had a lot of luck with video plug adapters, never really dealing with those again unless there's a good reason.

I figured the monitors were still plenty good, and if I were to upgrade them, I'll wait till nSurround can smash 4k handily and super cheap...
 
Yup and it usually seems to be the best route.

This is the best route unless the performance offered by the most powerful single card on the market is insufficient. At 4K, no single graphics card quite cuts it in all cases. At Eyefinity / NVSurround resolutions like 7680x1600 or 7680x1440 (or their portrait equivalents) a single graphics card is even less adequate.
 
This is the best route unless the performance offered by the most powerful single card on the market is insufficient. At 4K, no single graphics card quite cuts it in all cases. At Eyefinity / NVSurround resolutions like 7680x1600 or 7680x1440 (or their portrait equivalents) a single graphics card is even less adequate.

Yep, and until my monitors die, or a single card can pushe those resolutions...pretty happy with three 27" monitors in 5760X 1080 ;) (doesn't hurt that I'm getting old now too and bigger is better for my peepers :D
 
This is the best route unless the performance offered by the most powerful single card on the market is insufficient. At 4K, no single graphics card quite cuts it in all cases. At Eyefinity / NVSurround resolutions like 7680x1600 or 7680x1440 (or their portrait equivalents) a single graphics card is even less adequate.
so what difference does it make if the game doesn't support multi GPU or has issues anyway?
 
so what difference does it make if the game doesn't support multi GPU or has issues anyway?

None obviously. The point though is if the game can support it and while that's not many these days, there are some, SLI does make a quite noticeable different with Far Cry 5.
 
i still like SLI/Crossfire for the reliability standpoint, especially now on a Ryzen setup. when a GPU dies, you got a second backup still in place. this allows you time to hunt a better deal, or more recently, wait for prices to return to sanity. less of an issue when buying new, but those of us always picking up used, it does make since.
Gpus rarely die they are usually murdered
 
WTF are you doing that you're killing GPUs enough for this to be a thing?

The only time I've ever had a GPU die was back in the GTX 280 days when those would shit the bed on a regular basis.
running it OC'd right at its fucking limit, for years. Lost a 6850 after 4yrs, then went to 7970s bought used and had one start to throw BSODs this fall.
 
I ran SLI Voodo2s. Does that count?

I had a 570SLI set up, which later became a 770 4GB SLI setup. I went back to one 980ti because I couldn’t stand the microstutter.

I’m happy running a single card now.

My father on the other hand runs three 1200P monitors for pro flight sims. We have 2 1080s in SLI and he still needs more power.
 
I've toyed with SLI in the past, but my first real mega-rig was with GTX 980 Tri-SLI at launch. I had just got a triple screen 1440p setup and wanted to play in 3D Vision Surround. Let me tell you, at 7680x1440 in 3D, even 3 of the best cards are not enough.

Was able to find some games that could run at that res in 3D, at least on moderate settings, so it was fun. Trying to do that with one 980 (best card at the time) was not even a possibility. Granted there are bugs with SLI, bugs with Surround, and bugs with stereo 3D, so the whole thing was too much hassle. But when it worked it was glorious.

Now I mostly play on a 4K TV, and this is pretty taxing but more straight-forward in terms of software support. The 1080 Ti is about the only card that can really hang in 4K, and not in all games. So I'm using Vega 64 CF. It has it's problems, but when it works, I can get 4K near max settings in new games like Prey. Very nice.
 
I use my Titan XP for a main GPU and a Titan Maxwell for Physix. Almost never have any slowdowns plus it's not hurting anything. :) Probably going to use the XP for Physix when the new cards come out. (Depending on how fast it is)
Pretty sure that someone in my family will be happy to get the Maxwell since none of their GPU's are past the 780 Ti stage.
 
I use my Titan XP for a main GPU and a Titan Maxwell for Physix. Almost never have any slowdowns plus it's not hurting anything. :) Probably going to use the XP for Physix when the new cards come out. (Depending on how fast it is)
Pretty sure that someone in my family will be happy to get the Maxwell since none of their GPU's are past the 780 Ti stage.
Well that has to be about the dumbest use of a$1,000 video card I've ever seen but I guess it's your money. Considering there's only literally 2 or 3 games where Physx is even demanding enough to need a separate GPU to do anything with, what is the point? And then to be even crazier on top of that you're talking about keeping the $1,200 Titan XP as a Physx card going forward when there are absolutely no games coming out that will even need it. But yeah I guess a video card just sitting in your computer that could have been sold for several hundred dollars is "not hurting anything".
 
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Years ago (3?) I bought the GTX 960 with the intent of SLI'ing a pair of them - but it didn't happen. Now in the crazy world of GPU mining, even this old semi-obsolete card is selling for about what I originally paid for it on eBay, @$200
Nuts... Since the rest of my PC is an old hot steaming mess (8+ yo), I'll upgrade everything else but the GPU this summer and hope that new cards launch this fall and look for a deal around Black Friday.
 
I rearranged some of my builds and parts and now have a pair of Titan X Pascal (original) in SLI atm, found a cheap nvidia HB bridge.

SLI is generally meh and on its way out but from a system/powersupply standpoint it made the most sense to put them there for now. Game on it some, and test out various mining on it the rest of the time.
 
I almost always sell my old GPU cards to family members very cheap as they will almost never upgrade their computers themselves or get better ones unless i give them my old stuff or build one for them. (Which is where the Maxwell will end up most likely)
It isn't hurting anything and since most of the people i have tried and can sell it to want me to practically give it to them i see no reason not to keep it for a while. Still will have the XP if i decide to get the next gen card. (And can always sell the XP, use it for another build or to the family if i want)
 
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I'm running GTX 1080 Ti SLI. When it works, it's glorious. Most of the time it's complete overkill and it allows me to simulate insane resolutions using DSR. 6k usually. Sometimes 8k. The best example I have found is FFXV. I can get the game running maxed out at 4k resolution at a steady 60fps. I just use SMAA instead of the built-in TAA. However from what I can tell, a single Titan V can do just as well if not better in that game.

I will also say that there are a *lot* of games that don't support SLI at all, and it's pretty frustrating. AC: Origins comes to mind. That game needs SLI support badly and it will never happen. Also, toggling SLI on and off is a bit of a pain. You have to have all of your applications closed before you do it. It's cumbersome. I can't say I recommend SLI. Actually I think after the Pascal generation it will be deal. nVidia is moving to Infinity Fabric to essentially strap as many GPUs as they want onto a single die. Basically you will be able to buy the most bad-ass GPU that you want so long as you're willing to pay for it.
 
Twin 1080ti Asus Posiedon love them although it's in sli about 5% of the time.
 
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No SLI here, though I did try SLI GTX 760 4 GB cards for a bit. It was a pretty big step up in the games I was testing at the time, but the second card was intended for a friend's build and couldn't stay.

Then I got a GTX 980 and blew past what the SLI 760s could do, all while getting some newer GPU features on top of that. That's what I'm expecting will happen when NVIDIA finally brings Volta (that is, consumer Volta at a sane price, not the Titan V) to market.

Alas, going SLI 980 as an alternative to ridiculous Pascal card prices is not an option. VR games especially don't leverage SLI all that well at the moment, barring the few games that actually make a point of supporting VR SLI (Raw Data being one of them). They need as much single-GPU performance as you can get, and latency and judder need to be kept to an absolute minimum - not things that SLI and CrossFire have historically been any good at.

That said, SLI is kinda appealing from a "double your monitor outputs" standpoint, though I'm pretty sure people can do that with a cheaper card and SoftTH nowadays.
 
VR games especially don't leverage SLI all that well at the moment, barring the few games that actually make a point of supporting VR SLI (Raw Data being one of them). They need as much single-GPU performance as you can get, and latency and judder need to be kept to an absolute minimum - not things that SLI and CrossFire have historically been any good at.

Well, in theory, SLI could be extremely useful for high-end VR, with each GPU rendering to each eye separately. Here they would not be trying to split frames or render alternate frames, but instead rendering nearly the same frame at the same time, which should be much easier to sync.

That said, SLI is kinda appealing from a "double your monitor outputs" standpoint, though I'm pretty sure people can do that with a cheaper card and SoftTH nowadays.

You can do this with anything. Hell, I do it with the onboard Intel GPU alongside my 1080Ti. Extra 23"-class 1080p monitors cost almost nothing and are perfect for ancillery stuff like webpages, VOIP, or monitoring apps.
 
Well, in theory, SLI could be extremely useful for high-end VR, with each GPU rendering to each eye separately. Here they would not be trying to split frames or render alternate frames, but instead rendering nearly the same frame at the same time, which should be much easier to sync.
Yeah, I thought the same - in theory.

In practice, developers need to actually put the effort in to support it, and we all know how hit-and-miss that can be with various game developers. Raw Data may support it, but I still need to check if it's any benefit to DCS World or IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad/Moscow/Kuban whatsoever, which is unlikely since they're generally running on older, custom engines that are CPU-limited more than anything outside of VR with extreme supersampling. (No, seriously, we're gonna need some boosts in single-threaded CPU performance that just aren't happening if you want to keep the FPS up in those titles without resorting to any sort of Timewarp/Spacewarp/Reprojection/predictive interpolation.)

You can do this with anything. Hell, I do it with the onboard Intel GPU alongside my 1080Ti. Extra 23"-class 1080p monitors cost almost nothing and are perfect for ancillery stuff like webpages, VOIP, or monitoring apps.
I actually contemplated doing this with my Cintiq Companion Hybrid, but I also recall it kinda complicated making pen and touch register on the correct monitor, too. Didn't happen if I just adapted a DisplayPort output on my GTX 980. (HDMI's obviously tied up by the Rift.)

Definitely worth considering for just a plain display monitor, though. It's handy to reference game documents on the side.
 
In practice, developers need to actually put the effort in to support it, and we all know how hit-and-miss that can be with various game developers.

AMD and Nvidia appear to have taken a bit of a hiatus on multi-GPU while developers put support into game engines for the low-level APIs. All of the current licensable engines now support both, so I expect more uptake soon.

And with respect to VR, we're not even scratching the surface: see the new Google headset that's at 18MP, over twice what 4k is (8.3MP). A pair of hypothetical 1180Ti cards aren't likely to the 120Hz refresh rate that such a headset runs at. I expect both GPU vendors to start openly pushing GPU teaming for high-end VR.
 
Had 980s in SLI and it was nothing short of a disaster. Running Titan Xp in SLI and no issues at all. Like most things in life YMMV
 
so what difference does it make if the game doesn't support multi GPU or has issues anyway?

If a game doesn't support SLI, normally the effect is minimal or non-existent for all practical purposes. There are occasions where having SLI enabled causes a massive drop in performance but these issues are rare and easily mitigated by disabling SLI. To date, I've never had to disable SLI with my 1080Ti's.
 
What were the issues?
Every new game took a couple hours of tweaking/googling just to get it to load and not crash the system. All sorts of micro stutter and could only run games in windowed full screen. Tried new/clean drivers, tried reinstalling windows and didn't help. Driver updates were 50/50 if they caused problems and I ended up rolling back multiple times. When you only have a few hours a week to play games it becomes really frustrating.

Same exact machine besides the titans and its all good now.
 
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