Is Sli dead?

[Aqium2]

Will new games continue to support Sli or are we going to be pushed towards a single Gpu card gaming solution?
Predictions?

 

[Sinistercr0c]

Why cut off your nose to spite your face? With SLI Nvidia has the capability to sell more cards....why would they stop doing that?

 

[Martell1977]

Dead? No, but nVidia seems to be putting as little effort into it as possible. But they never miss an opportunity to make more money. I mean selling SLI bridges...seriously? It's 2017, shouldn't the bridges have disappeared by now? I do know that nVidia has killed SLI for the 1060 and everything below that. I guess they would rather people spend $600 on a 1080 $450-$500 for equal to or a little more performance.

Games will still be hit of miss for SLI support, but as long as nVidia sees money out there, they will push some developers to add support.

 

[InvalidError]

With DX12 and Vulkan, the emphasis is on explicit multi-GPU where the multi-GPU burden is put on the game developers. If game developers want to properly support multi-GPU, they'll have to write their code accordingly.

Implicit multi-GPU (CF/SLI) is still possible but as always, mileage will vary depending on how the game is written and how much additional support drivers are able to provide them.

 

[dontlistentome]

I think it's economics. More people buy one card. One card to buy, one card to set up, one card to power. For SLI you need a special motherboard, and you need a more expensive power supply to handle two cards. So with a small, niche market, what's the incentive for game developers to spend time and effort on SLI? Nvidia doesn't care, since they are going to sell X dollars worth of cards, whether it's one card costing X or two cards costing X/2 each.

 

[Shaun o]

In my mind the current way it is going with the pricing of graphics cards, and considering the amount of gain you get in some but not all games when doing Sli.

The cost of doing Sli for quiet a few people is a little bit rich these days !

That`s about the only thing I could think of if there was a decline in people buying two matching graphic card models to Sli them.

Since Nvidia really has no solid competition in the graphics card market, and why the price of a 1080 GTX in most cases is high.

If AMD pull there finger out with Vega Gpu equipped graphics cards and they do a half decent job of keeping up, or equaling Nvidia`s offerings then I dare say card prices may drop a bit.

Making Sli configurations more attractive due to the lower pricing of the cards.

 

[Aqium2]

I am currently considering 2x Galax HOF OC 1070 or 1 Galax HOF OC 1080. $1298.00 versus $1100.00. The sli should outperform the single 1080 at a $200 penalty. There just needs to be software support to make Sli viable. Gotta love the prices $$$ in Australia.

 

[renz496]

Why cut off your nose to spite your face? With SLI Nvidia has the capability to sell more cards....why would they stop doing that?

true. selling more gpu is gpu maker interest be in nvidia or amd. but it is not game developer interest. to them multi gpu only brings in more complexity that did not exist with single gpu only. so when they develop their game engine they never really think about what is work well or not with multi gpu tech. then end result is what we get right now: more and more game engine that are not working well with multi gpu tech.

 

[renz496]

Dead? No, but nVidia seems to be putting as little effort into it as possible. But they never miss an opportunity to make more money. I mean selling SLI bridges...seriously? It's 2017, shouldn't the bridges have disappeared by now? I do know that nVidia has killed SLI for the 1060 and everything below that. I guess they would rather people spend $600 on a 1080 $450-$500 for equal to or a little more performance.

Games will still be hit of miss for SLI support, but as long as nVidia sees money out there, they will push some developers to add support.

nvidia simply saw there isn't much future with multi gpu. people said that nvidia kill SLI with 1060 so it will not going to sacrifice 1070/1080 sales but the truth is how many people in the mid range will SLI their 1060? in the past we sli mid range gpu not just to save on money but also to gain more performance than the fastest single gpu can offer. GTX460 SLI for example on average 20% faster than GTX480. but with current mid range you only able to get x80 performance only if you have perfect scaling let alone exceed them. but the worst offender for multi gpu is the game itself. more and more game engines are built using tech that did not work well with tech used in multi gpu making supporting multi gpu even harder.