Will SLI Ever Properly Utilize VRAM?

[OzMartini]

I recently bought a 1440p monitor, and then decided to buy another GTX 760 to go with it. I thought that'd be more than sufficient to run at 1440p, since I'd then have 4gb of VRAM. However, I soon learned that SLI doesn't utilize the VRAM of each GPU independently, and thus I only have 2gb of usable VRAM.

Right now, I'm fine. Games like Tomb Raider and AC3 are running beautifully at 1440p. However, I know in the future that games will start hogging more and more video ram. Already, watchdogs is stuttering for me when I put textures on high; even at 1080p.

So, my question to you guys is, do you think that Nvidia will ever update SLI to utilize the 4gb of VRAM that I actually have, or am I forever stuck with 2gb until my next upgrade? Is it even theoretically possible for them to do that?

 

[i7Baby]

SLI is by definition each card doing its own thing in sync with the master card.

The moral of your story is to do research before jumping into something. You could bought 4gb version 760's for 1440p.

 

[OzMartini]

SLI is by definition each card doing its own thing in sync with the master card.

The moral of your story is to do research before jumping into something. You could bought 4gb version 760's for 1440p.

Well I bought the first 760 a while back without considering the 1440p monitor, so even if I wanted to I couldn't really have bought two 4gb 760's.

 

[emdea22]

nvidia being nvidia never updates older GPUs to new tech even if they could. While there are rumors that nvidia is working on a new gpu architecture that can directly utilize ddr4 memory it will 100% not be available on older GPUs. I can say with almost absolute certainty that you will never see your cards using 4gb of memory as one big pile. You're currently using 4gb but its 2gb mirrored.

And again thats why i recommend buying cards with at least 3gb of memory. Most new games will be console ports that are made to run on 6gb+ vram.

 

[RobCrezz]

No I dont think that will happen until PCI-E bandwidth is much higher - They cannot share vram as to transfer the information between cards would be too slow.

 

[OzMartini]

Thank you for the straight answer, RobCrezz.