Yup, SLI is kind of dead. Implementing SLI/CRFX requires a lot of coding, as well as resources/time. The game developers need to make sure that the game's engine is going to scale well. Apart from this, NVLINK might take the place of SLI though in near future, mostly in DX12 API.
I just hope NVLINK brings something new to the table, especially in DX12 multi-gpu mode. . We all know SLI days are over, but what about NVLink ?
You guys must be aware that NVidia has introduced a new interface called NVLINK with the consumer Turing GPUs, instead of the old SLI. Obviously, it's the same multi-GPU bridge which can be used for gaming, but it has an interface with many times the bandwidth of an SLI connection.
Since NVLink can be used for direct memory access between cards, and not through the PCIe slots as this was creating a huge bottleneck with SLI, so I think NVlink might be the future, if we go by Nvidia's theory....
But I could be wrong as well, because not many Games might be able to reap the full benefits of NVlinK, because the same thing happened with SLI. SLI bridges mostly used to have a bandwidth of 1GB/s (normal bridge), and 2GB/s (for the HB bridge), with a rough estimate.
NVLink on Turing cards can do 25GB/s one way, and or 50GB/s in total. But according to Nvidia, total bandwidth is 50GB/s one way, and 100GB/s total. But all of this will only help, if GAMES are going to take advantage of this new multi-GPU feature, provided the Game developers also implement this.
IMO, I think the main advantage of Nvlink is that it might help with peer-to-peer interface, VRAM stacking, because essentially the GPUs are much closer together now, also bringing the latency of a GPU-to-GPU transfer way down. So unlike SLI, where the latency had to go through PCIe as well as memory, Nvlink behaves in a different manner.
We can think of it an app that looks at one GPU, and then looks at another GPU and does something else same time. So it seems NVlink will be the future when it comes to multi-GPU setup, but sadly ONLY on the high-end market segment, as other Turing cards will lack NVLINK support.
But again, like I said before, all of this will actually depend on how well the Game's ENGINE benefits from a future multi-GPU setup. Also, assuming NVLINK will also help with VRAM stacking, the 2 GPUS should support Split Frame rendering/SFR. Unlike the previous AFR mode used mostly in SLI, Alternate frame rendering that is, in which each GPU used it's own frame buffer/VRAM, and it never got added/stacked.
According to theory,
In AFR, each GPU renders each of the other frame (either the alternate Odd or Even).
In SFR, each GPU renders half of every frame. (top/bottom, or plane division).
So I think NVLINK should also help with VRAM stacking, though we need to see how this gets implemented fully in most of the Games, either in DX12 or VULKAN API mode. Apart from this, even the price of an NVLINK bridge is kind of high, so this can be a very expensive multi-GPU setup, and not many gamers might be able to afford these. Can't comment about the performance on NVlink though.
Just my 2 cents ! Sorry to go a bit off topic, btw.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram