{"id":9146,"date":"2020-09-18T17:09:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-18T17:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/rip-nvidia-slams-the-final-nail-in-slis-coffin-no-new-profiles-after-2020\/"},"modified":"2020-09-18T17:09:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-18T17:09:00","slug":"rip-nvidia-slams-the-final-nail-in-slis-coffin-no-new-profiles-after-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/rip-nvidia-slams-the-final-nail-in-slis-coffin-no-new-profiles-after-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP: Nvidia slams the final nail in SLI’s coffin, no new profiles after 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

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RIP: Nvidia slams the final nail in SLI’s coffin, no new profiles after 2020<\/h2>\n

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Pour one out, enthusiasts. Nvidia\u2019s beastly new GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards just slammed the final nail into SLI\u2019s coffin. Well, almost.<\/p>\n

A glaring fact jumped out at me while I was sifting through Nvidia\u2019s product pages for our GeForce RTX 30-series vs. RTX 20-series spec comparison: Only the monstrous $1,500 GeForce RTX 3090 includes support for NVLink, the proprietary connector that enables SLI mult-GPU configurations. Even the $800 GeForce RTX 3080 lacks it, and Nvidia calls that graphics card the 30-series flagship. (The RTX 3090 is a \u201cBFGPU<\/a>\u201d above and beyond the rest.) Given that\u00a0Nvidia controls 80 percent of the graphics card market, it\u00a0seems clear that the days of slapping multiple graphics cards into your PC to boost frame rates is effectively over.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Update:\u00a0<\/strong>Not even the RTX 3090 will support SLI. On September 17, Nvidia announced it \u201cwill no longer be adding new SLI driver profiles on RTX 20 Series and earlier GPUs starting on January 1st, 2021,\u201d and RTX 30-series GPUs will not receive SLI profiles at all. Games that use DirectX 12 or Vulkan multi-GPU implementations will continue to work, but those are very few and far between. \u201cExisting SLI driver profiles will continue to be tested and maintained for SLI-ready RTX 20 Series and earlier GPUs,\u201d the company says, and SLI will continue to work for creative and professional apps. <\/em><\/p>\n

Our original story continues below.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That said, it\u2019s been effectively over for a while. Nvidia reduced SLI support to just two graphics cards during the GTX 10-series generation four long years ago. Rival\u00a0AMD phased out CrossFire multi-GPU support for its Radeon GPUs soon after. But even that reduced support has stuttered in recent years, as graphics cards became powerful enough to drive 1440p and 4K displays by their lonesome.<\/p>\n

\"nvidia<\/a> Nvidia<\/small>
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The GeForce RTX 3080 lacks SLI connectors.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Making matters worse, multi-GPU support has become increasingly wonky in games themselves over the years. Such setups were always a niche consisting of deep-pocketed enthusiasts, making it hard for developers to justify supporting SLI. SLI also slowly lost its reason for being, first because many games tied physics to frame rates, and inevitably because of the rise of ultra-powerful GPUs. Even if you invested in an SLI setup, it flat-out wouldn\u2019t work in many of today\u2019s games. In the ones that did <\/em>support it, it didn\u2019t work well\u2014technically implementing it was always a nightmare for devs.\u00a0Game developers can\u00a0<\/i>use DirectX 12 to implement multi-GPU without a connector, but it\u2019s telling that virtually none of them have.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve warned would-be buyers off multi-GPU configurations for years now. Nvidia just sealed the deal.<\/p>\n

Well, almost<\/em>, like I said. The GeForce RTX 3090 still supports it, but that\u2019s because it\u2019s the only card that still needs<\/em> it to meet its intended use. Nvidia\u2019s pitching this beast as the first-ever 8K-capable graphics card, and that\u2019s with the company\u2019s fantastic DLSS 2.0 technology enabled. Not many games support DLSS yet, and even the ones that do could still use more help to hit smooth frame rates at such a ludicrous resolution. If you thought pushing pixels at 4K resolution was rough, check out these Nvidia performance metrics at 8K:<\/p>\n

\"8k<\/a> Nvidia<\/small>
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An Nvidia-supplied chart showing the GeForce RTX 3090\u2019s performance at 8K resolution<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An NVLink connection can also help with compute and content creation workloads for this pricey Titan-in-all-but-name.<\/p>\n

So yeah, SLI isn\u2019t technically dead, but it\u2019s effectively dead for all but the top 0.1 percent of us. If you\u2019ve got $3,000 to drop on a pair of RTX 3090s, by all means feel free to lord it over your geeky pals. Just don\u2019t expect developers to spend much time making sure it works great in your games.\u00a0<\/p>\n