NVIDIA will no longer be adding new SLI driver profiles starting on January 1st, 2021

TaintedSquirrel

TaintedSquirrel

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https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5082


With the emergence of low level graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, game developers are able to implement SLI support natively within the game itself instead of relying upon a SLI driver profile. The expertise of the game developer within their own code allows them to achieve the best possible performance from multiple GPUs. As a result, NVIDIA will no longer be adding new SLI driver profiles on RTX 20 Series and earlier GPUs starting on January 1st, 2021. Instead, we will focus efforts on supporting developers to implement SLI natively inside the games. We believe this will provide the best performance for SLI users.


Existing SLI driver profiles will continue to be tested and maintained for SLI-ready RTX 20 Series and earlier GPUs.

For GeForce RTX 3090 and future SLI-capable GPUs, SLI will only be supported when implemented natively within the game
 
Developers won’t do this so SLI is pretty much dead now.
 
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Hell SLi was pretty much dead with my dual 1080 GTXs. Sucks because my dual 1080s would have held there own still. Also I would have easily have bought 2 x 3080 RTX to drive 4k@120hz. You would think they would have thought of a way to do this at hardware level or at least so everything just see’s 2 or more cards as one card in a pool. Come on AMD use some of that CPU magic to intergrate multi gpus on one card. I’ll pay the extra lol
 
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It's a shame. I made the mistake of keep going for dual cards even up until the last gen, but outside of Quake 2 RTX, I didn't play a game which used SLI. I was hoping originally that the RTX capable games would have SLI capability, because I really like RTX as a feature, but it's performance leaves much to be desired. Sadly, the current engines mostly seem to focus on single card solutions.

Now, I still need multiple video cards for other non gaming related reasons, but I guess instead of going for 2x 3090s, I can just get 1, and leave one of my old video cards in as a second one.
 
Multi-GPU gaming has been dead for a few years now. This is just the final nail in the proverbial coffin.
 
Once the extra work was essentially dumped on devs via dx12, it was over. I mean, were devs who are pushed/stressed to meet deadlines in large games releases really going to take on the extra work for niche use cases?

still sad to see the tech put away - I liked the power of it when it was cared for.
 
I always had issues with SLI, microstuttering and whatnot. Dropped it after the GTX 970 in favor of a single 1080.
 
Because DirectX 12 is a low-level API, Nvidia’s old mechanisms for enabling SLI performance in DX11 games can’t work the same way, and developers have had a limited appetite for implementing SLI in the first place. Things might have evolved in a different direction if SLI had become truly popular. In a world where consumers prefer playing with two lower-cost GPUs as opposed to a higher-cost model, we might have seen more of an effort to develop engines and rendering techniques specifically friendly to multi-GPU scaling. This did not happen.


It seems unlikely Nvidia will retain the feature indefinitely, and the RTX 3090 may be the last card to feature it


https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/...gives-up-the-ghost-as-nvidia-ends-sli-support
 
Marees said:
Because DirectX 12 is a low-level API, Nvidia’s old mechanisms for enabling SLI performance in DX11 games can’t work the same way, and developers have had a limited appetite for implementing SLI in the first place. Things might have evolved in a different direction if SLI had become truly popular. In a world where consumers prefer playing with two lower-cost GPUs as opposed to a higher-cost model, we might have seen more of an effort to develop engines and rendering techniques specifically friendly to multi-GPU scaling. This did not happen.


It seems unlikely Nvidia will retain the feature indefinitely, and the RTX 3090 may be the last card to feature it


https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/...gives-up-the-ghost-as-nvidia-ends-sli-support
Click to expand...

Didn't NVidia state that the 20xx series was the last series to handle SLI, and not the 30xx series?

As far as multi-GPU though, NVidia is never going to get rid of that. There's a lot more software than just games that need it, and many smaller companies loved the Titan series for the cheapness of the solution.
 
Nytegard said:
Didn't NVidia state that the 20xx series was the last series to handle SLI, and not the 30xx series?

As far as multi-GPU though, NVidia is never going to get rid of that. There's a lot more software than just games that need it, and many smaller companies loved the Titan series for the cheapness of the solution.
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3090 has NVlink but only 3xxx card to have multi-gpu. basically it's because it's this gen's titan.
 
In the day of $1,500 cards, SLI is dead.

(Assuming you could even fit two of them in your case.)

((For the handful of people in the world who would SLI multiple 3090s in their home PC, well, I wish I could feel your pain. ;) ))
 
Market share of dual gpu is not significant enough to warrant developer implementation. Said this several years ago when they announced those LLaPis
 
Regardless, I am sure that some folks will buy *2* 3090 just for the bragging rights!
 
Gonna have to be that guy and tell you ladies the uncomfortable truth, so pull your pants down and start lubing up your precious booty holes because the server business is now more profitable than gaming. It's obvious to any economist and professional user if you just look at the facts: The 3090 CUDA count numbers that doubled, yet provide no linear performance boost in gaming as we're starting to see in the benchmark scores, but are a boon for professional users. VRAM also doubling yet are not good to gamers but are an absolute must to 3d designers and machine learning scientists. And now we have SLI support being axed completely, yet NVLink will freely available to the 3090's.

hmmmmmmmmm... I wonder why.

Still don't believe me, well when you have clients who are buying 27,000 gpu's for their supercomputers, and that number is only going to continue to grow. If you are NVIDIA, if you are about profit and staying ahead of the curve in terms of where the technological shift is going, then it's time to realize the gaming division is going to continue ride pine to the big boys like Google, Facebook, and all of the other data giants who are in fierce competition for yours and my metadata.

I gotta hand it to their marketing team, they did an excellent job trying to convince the masses that the 3090 is not a TITAN, when the hardware specs all say otherwise. It's obvious that if they intended it to be a professional card it would eat into their profits so it's advantageous to appeal to both the gamers and professionals. Unfortunately gamers are more naive and not nuanced on these things. And my final nail in the coffin to this whole point: If you look at the benchmark scores with rendering programs like Blender, Octane, and V-Ray look at how impressive these scores are with just a 3080. Quick snippet from this report:

"When we wrote our RTX 3080 launch article, we mentioned that it was a “2080 Ti Killer for $700”, but the truth is, this new GPU even has the TITAN RTX in its sights. Versus that, the RTX 3080 is 47% faster, but in comparison to the previously-gen $699 2080 SUPER, it’s 103% faster. It’s 3x faster than the 1080 Ti, released also at $699 a few years ago." ​
​
To put this in perspective , running two 2080 Ti's on average scores 738 mpaths from the Chaosgroup benchmark site. The 3080 is at 635. That is a ridiculous performance bump for a fraction of the cost. On top of that, it's also destroying both Quadro RTX 6000 and 8000 which both retail over $4000-5500 and are only averaging 350 on the mpath score. The writing is on the wall boys, just like how all the gaming divisions decided to design for consoles first and pc gamers had to play second fiddle, we're now witnessing the technological shift where data is worth more than oil.

Brave new world mutha fuckas...
 
c3k said:
In the day of $1,500 cards, SLI is dead.

(Assuming you could even fit two of them in your case.)

((For the handful of people in the world who would SLI multiple 3090s in their home PC, well, I wish I could feel your pain. ;) ))
Click to expand...
this
your looking at $3500 MINIMUM buy in for 2x 3090's and nvlink bridge. and then power ... these are 350 to 450w OR MORE cards thats 700w to 900w before we even get to the rest of the system. a 1000w PSU is going to be maxing out on any kind of system you would think of putting that much GPU in since the rest of the PC likely will be in the 300w range
 
Marees said:
Things might have evolved in a different direction if SLI had become truly popular. In a world where consumers prefer playing with two lower-cost GPUs as opposed to a higher-cost model, we might have seen more of an effort to develop engines and rendering techniques specifically friendly to multi-GPU scaling. This did not happen.
Click to expand...

Consumers didn't move in that direction because manufacturers and the industry didn't let them.

c3k said:
In the day of $1,500 cards, SLI is dead.
Click to expand...

Precisely. Amd and Nvidia don't see a dime from the second hand sale that adds a second or third card to bring a user up to current gen performance while staying on the previous gen. They want you to get that new 1500$ version, and so no love was ever really given to multi GPU setups. Notice though, when it was implemented well, it worked beautifully. Wonder how that works if it was so complicated and difficult to program

They probably wish the whole concept would go away tbh
 
Elios said:
this
your looking at $3500 MINIMUM buy in for 2x 3090's and nvlink bridge. and then power ... these are 350 to 450w OR MORE cards thats 700w to 900w before we even get to the rest of the system. a 1000w PSU is going to be maxing out on any kind of system you would think of putting that much GPU in since the rest of the PC likely will be in the 300w range
Click to expand...

Well, I am working on a program for work right now that does use multi-GPU. There's more than just games. And I already have the power supply that will work. I'm mainly concerned about space (which I won't know until the card actually comes out). I'm getting one, but if there were games in the future coming out, I'd replace my other RTX card with a 3090. If not, I'm leaving that card in as the second.
 
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