Question Would an RTX 3080 offer any improvement over 2 GTX 1080s running in SLI?

[jthom137]

Now that crypto miners are losing their shirts I'd like to bring my battle station to the year 2020. I currently own a PC with two GTX 1080s running in SLI but would like to get a single-GPU setup as, from what I can tell, most games run better with a single GPU. I'm concerned however as benchmarks that I've found seem to indicate that upgrading to a single RTX 1080 from 2 GTX 1080s would offer, at best, marginally better performance or perhaps even no performance improvement. What sort of performance can I expect from an RTX 3080 over 2x GTX 1080s?

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I can’t speak to how much improvement you’ll see but I think one 1080 is close to a 3060. Keep in mind too that sli is basically a dead technology. I don’t think many developers are really using it these days, so you might benefit just for the fact of having a single card and not having to worry about sli scaling etc.

 

[KananX]

The best you will get out of it is that it works everywhere and with games that don’t support SLI and a bit less power consumption. I would only do it if SLI support is a issue in the games I play, otherwise wait for next gen.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

The best you will get out of it is that it works everywhere and with games that don’t support SLI and a bit less power consumption. I would only do it if SLI support is a issue in the games I play, otherwise wait for next gen.

That’s a very very good point as I think new cars start releasing this year, so if you can hold off that would be a good play. They are talking like the next nvidia cards could get power hungry, may be worth looking into amd as well.

 

[Karadjgne]

benchmarks that I've found seem to indicate that upgrading to a single RTX 1080 from 2 GTX 1080s would offer, at best, marginally better performance or perhaps even no performance improvement

SLI. A few games supported it well enough to get about 70ish % fps improvement. Most other games averaged around 30-40%. And there are a few that actually did worse with sli enabled.

And now it's dead, or close enough not to be a thing anymore for any games released that use Vulcan or DX12. Leaving you with minimal choices of yesterday's DX11 titles.

So it doesn't really matter about the benchmarks, they are ancient history. Doesn't matter even if they prove that a single 3080 gets roughly the same fps as sli 1080's in a select few titles. What's going to matter is the 99% of the rest of the titles, and anything coming out tomorrow played on a 3080 are going to spank that 1080 like the proverbial red headed step child. Because the SLI won't apply. It won't be supported. Won't work. You'll be reduced to mgpu status that maybe might work if you remove the sli. And be stuck with 6Gb worth of gpus in games that already can eat up north of 12Gb at higher resolutions.

You are basing your decision based on 1% of the titles out there, which soon enough will be 0.1% and get similar performance. Nvidia has all but canceled support entirely on SLI, it's the reason only the 3090/ti carries sli bridge, and that'll be phased out entirely most likely with the 4000 series. Nobody codes for it, nvidia no longer supports it, it's basically dead. So realistically, you got nada tomorrow except 2x 1080's.

 

[spentshells]

the dying throws of the crypto bubble are upon us.... sell those dirty old 1080's now and get as much cash as you can, by the release of the next cards they are 3 gens old worth 30% less than they are now.

Hell you could sell them for a 250 each or more! to the right ebay sucker "buyer" and you are almost at a price level where you can buy a 6900xt or 3080 12 GB for a couple"few" hundred bucks.

I have no doubt your cards have been well maintained, but they simply aren't worth what others are selling them for... not anymore anyhow. You have 2 months before they are worth under 200 a piece .... selllllll.

3080 is gonna be a giant step up.

Have a look here.....

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

 

[hotaru.hino]

A few other points to add:

• Even if the frame rate appears to be good with SLI, the problem is most applications uses alternate frame rendering which can cause microstuttering. While I believe NVIDIA alleviated a lot of this, there's still the potential for frame pacing issues.
• SLI doesn't combine VRAM. Not that I think it matters since 8GB still seems to fair pretty well, but it is a point to consider.
• The RTX GPUs offer support for DX12 Ultimate features (I believe Vulkan has these, but not under some fancy name), such as:
  • Mesh shaders
  • Variable rate shading
  • Hardware accelerated ray tracing
  • Sampler Feedback
• RTX GPUs also support DLSS. While you could argue FSR is a thing, it likely won't be backported to games that have DLSS already and DLSS will continue to exist alongside FSR.

Ultimately though, unless you're not getting the performance you want out of your current setup or there's something else that's nagging you about it, I don't see a real need to change any hardware.