NVIDIA Will No Longer Provide SLI Driver Profiles

[Tsing]

Image: NVIDIA



It appears that NVIDIA is distancing itself even further from its multi-GPU technology. According to a new support article, the company won’t be providing new SLI (Scalable Link Interface) driver profiles for GeForce RTX 20 Series and earlier graphics cards starting on January 1, 2021. Instead, it’ll simply work with developers on implementing SLI natively inside of games.



What this probably means is that SLI gaming is on its last legs. Dual-GPU setups are relatively unpopular these days, so we’re guessing that the majority of developers won’t even bother with the implementation going forward. Additionally, NVIDIA’s NVLink – the high-speed interconnect that enables multi-GPU configurations – has largely been omitted from the GeForce RTX 30 Series (only the $1,499 GeForce RTX 3090 supports it)...

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[magoo]

SLi was so good when it was properly implemented.......good bye old friend.

 

[Armenius]

SLi was so good when it was properly implemented.......good bye old friend.

It has not been like that for years, though. Last time I had a legitimately good experience with SLI was 2012. I did 970 SLI very shortly before selling and replacing them with a single GTX Titan X. I was getting so many visual deficiencies in games that I dropped it entirely and spent $300 more on the most powerful single card at the time. I have been doing so ever since.

 

[Grimlakin]

I mean if you think about how processors are designed and scale now... a 3080 is basically an SLI setup of two 2080's. Look at the core counts and such. Just a bit more tweaking around memory channels and use.

SLI has been replaced by core count. Just like Core count for home consumers replaced multi CPU use. The only areas where SLI and multiple sockets exist is in workstations and enterprise hypervisor hosts.

 

[Burticus]

Last good SLI action I had was Voodoo 2's...

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I think long term this could be good. That is if they provide the support needed by devs to implement DX12 MGPU. Potentially a win/win for all but the hard part is getting the devs on board. For all the bravado of Ampere, it's still obvious we have games now that tax them. With PCIe 4.0 there should be plenty of bus available for cards to communicate instead of using the older SLI method.

 

[LazyGamer]

SLi was so good when it was properly implemented.......good bye old friend.

It was!

I think long term this could be good. That is if they provide the support needed by devs to implement DX12 MGPU.

The support is there; it's in the popular game engines too. What they're missing is the drive from developers, which is understandable, if a bit unfortunate. Lots of effort with little payoff and so on.

For all the bravado of Ampere, it's still obvious we have games now that tax them.

And yet, most of what gamers play simply doesn't come close. Yes, you can turn settings up to make and current GPU cry, that just isn't an experience that game developers are really targeting.

But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't, or won't. VR, while still a tiny niche with respect to high-end desktop gaming, demands more performance than is currently likely to be available for the foreseeable future. Something like 4k, per eye, with 90FPS 0.1% lows, and hopefully with the graphics options set higher than potato?

I'm really surprised that the 'GPU per eye' concept hasn't at least been pushed out to consumers. It seems like the perfect companion to SLI.

With PCIe 4.0 there should be plenty of bus available for cards to communicate instead of using the older SLI method.

While there's significantly more bus bandwidth available with PCIe 4.0 than is needed for GPUs, I'm not sure if it's enough for a reincarnation of SLI that would deliver on the promises of the technology without incurring known drawbacks. Frame time consistency being key, with input latency being an extremely close second. mGPU needs to be able to do some kind of concurrent frame rendering without messing with frame delivery or affecting responsiveness for it to really be acceptable again, in my opinion, and limiting GPUs to communication only over the system bus may still be a hindrance.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

limiting GPUs to communication only over the system bus may still be a hindrance.

Perhaps but it'd sure be nice to see some benchmarks to represent it.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

GPU per eye

Agreed. One of the reasons I didn't jump into VR is the resolution is a step backward for me.

drive from developers

Hopefully, if NV holds their hands a bit more they'll more willing. That's more of what I meant in terms of support. Sure the features are there. Documentation, etc. but if they really want to support it there will need to be more direct interaction.

 

[David_Schroth]

Perhaps but it'd sure be nice to see some benchmarks to represent it.

AMD went bridgeless for CrossFire a long time ago and it turned out just fine. Go jump in a review time machine and check it out!

 

[MadMummy76]

I wish SLI was still great. I used it as recently as a year ago, because for productivity two cards scale almost 100%. But very few games actually supported it properly. Last good experience I had with SLI was with Crossfire

 

[LazyGamer]

I wish SLI was still great. I used it as recently as a year ago, because for productivity two cards scale almost 100%. But very few games actually supported it properly. Last good experience I had with SLI was with Crossfire

I wish I'd given it a chance after my pair of HD6950s. I got to see firsthand what really represents the worst multi-GPU can get, with framerates nearly doubling but the overall experience falling short to even that of a single card due to the poorly paced frame delivery.

I did use a pair of GTX670s and then a pair of GTX970s afterward, and those ran pretty well for my needs, with the memory configuration issue on the GTX970s only really becoming an issue for the games I played at the time when I pushed settings to the point that the cards were really struggling in terms of raw performance. Back off the settings a bit and they singed.

Overall, with good DX11 implementations, I couldn't really fault SLI. It wasn't perfect but it did work plenty well in practice, and with GTX970 SLI paired with a G-Sync monitor, honestly a pretty good experience.


Of course, that's just my experience. Multi-GPU brings with it another stack of variables that could wrench stuff up for users, so even when it worked well, it just wasn't the best solution unless the fastest card available simply wasn't fast enough for whatever workload.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I wish SLI was still great. I used it as recently as a year ago, because for productivity two cards scale almost 100%. But very few games actually supported it properly. Last good experience I had with SLI was with Crossfire

The last good experience I had with it, en masse anyway, was with 2 x 970s. At the time still had about a half dozen new games supporting it, plus another dozen or so from before, and had things running smoothly enough that micro stutter was near nonexistent. After that, I had one final SLI setup with 2 x 1080s and the only new game that supported it was Mass Effect Andromeda. During that time I actually saw NV drivers, and various remasters, either decrease or remove any gains made before.