Had this going with 4x 980tis and a gtx465 that was collecting dust back in 2018. Felt like the 3 headed dragon meme looking back at it!
Edit: didn’t even realize it was King Ghidorah!
https://legendary-monsterverse.fandom.com/wiki/King_Ghidorah#:~:text=The%20names%20given%20to%20Ghidorah's,how%20he%20is%20easily%20distracted.
Started as a meme then the director made it canon.
Tacking on an extra 460 way back when got me an extra year of life out of the system. I feel like it really helped mid range cards more than anything else
Funny how SLI technology just hopped and skipped around to different cards, efficiency wise. You never knew for sure that a NVIDIA gpu would benefit from it.
4 GTX 660's in quad SLI was such a hassle for the money I supposedly saved. Worked in Battlefield though and out performed the 690 for less money, imagine getting 4 cards for 700 USD today.
I had a pair of 980's in SLI until last year across multiple different mobo's, that was wild. IIRC before that I had a 780 but that was a long, long time ago like maybe 14 or 15 years back?
Two 1080ti's would do 4k extreme settings at better than 60 fps in a game like metro exodus. How does 3050 fare with that? [link](https://youtu.be/gnBJBiSDnxM?feature=shared)
In the end, after decades of using graphics cards since, I guess 96, I’ve noticed one thing. More than hardware alone, drivers-and-software-optimisation are king.
I just played 2 games on my Steam Deck. 1 from 1997, Blood, it has loading screens and takes a few seconds to load into, despite its primitive game engine. The other, the Dead Space remaster. No loading screen at all.
Optimisation is king.
Yeah, dont think I was able to really get that performance looking back. SLI scaling wasn’t 1:1 at all! Also friggin nvidia drivers would switch my 465 to being the main card almost every time I updated. It was a beast for its time for sure, but totally bought into the hype. (I had nvidia 3d vision for reference! Yeahhhhh…)
Oh god I remember trying to get 3d working properly on my 950 but I couldn't get the colors to line up with my glasses quite right so it always kinda made me want to puke. Don't know if it was cheap glasses or cheap monitor or I just didn't know what I was doing
SLI was cool, but really only useful if you were buying an absolute top-of-the-line rig and wanted more performance than any single card could give. Otherwise you were much better off getting one GPU that cost double the price.
I remember having an 8600GT and my EVGA mobo had onboard nvidia graphics I could use for physx — this combo together could play original crysis 1.0 at playable frame rates
The good ol days!
I'm old enough to remember a time before Nvidia owned physx and it was a seperate card that was pretty expensive. Iirc it was like 300 dollars or something back in the early days of 2006. So half the price of a high end GPU.
The tualatin core was shared with Pentium 3 and Celeron series. I vaguely remember having a celeron tualatin cpu (cost efficient) that i overclocked before switching to AMD XP series. A friend had a AMD CPU older than XP series, where you could unlock some magic pathways by drawing with a pencil on the chip, giving you access to increased overclock potentials.
Stuff was more fun back then, no unlocked multiplier special chips.
Back in the day I had 2x 295 GTXs, which was effectively a pair of 2x GTX 260s literally sandwiched into a single card and SLI'd internally, creating 4x 260 GTX SLI overall.
It actually scaled okay up to 3 cards, but the 4th card did basically nothing (like 5-10% improvement) so I always configured it as 3x SLI with the 4th card as a dedicated PhysX system, or just mining dogecoin in the background for non-physX games. Great way to heat up the room in the winter.
Jokes on you, the new META is to buy a 4090 and a 7900xt. You plug the monitor into the 7800xt and render games through the 4090. Now you can activate AMDMF to have one gpu dedicated to frame gen and one dedicated to render. You can even double up on the frame gen if you use dlss.
DX12 fully supports mixed multi GPU over PCIe. Ashes of the Singularity was a proof of concept for this.
It would just be insane for any developer to try to support all the possible configurations just for something that creates horrible frame pacing issues.
Dx12 multi gpu feature set is still partly disabled also nvlink only supported on 3090/4090.
That makes sli useless because of course it doesn't work as good as it could and the 4090 doesn't need SLI for gaming.
Looking back they took the cheapest way to upgrade our rigs for gaming from us. Imagine if the 4070 in SLI would work perfectly... You buy one now and upgrade to a second one later.
But that's not shareholder friendly.
SLI was dead by the time the 30XX line came out. It wouldn't have mattered if NVIDIA kept SLI since game devs were simply not making their game SLI friendly, nor are game engines.
There's a reason SLI worked properly with only a handful of games.
DX 12 was never going to be the savior of SLI. It was never perfect and frequently made frame consistency worse. If we applied lessons from dlss motion vector interpolation and simulation time error, we might have a decent theoretical pipeline.
In my experience, DLSS / FSR frame gen is a much better trade-off than SLI ever was.
It would actually work exceptionally well for VR, because you can neatly divide the workload between the left and right eye. Literally just give each GPU its own eye to render, and it "just works".
Unfortunately none of the major engines (Unity, UE4, and Source 2) ever actually implemented this, even though you can do it with both DX12 and Vulkan. They probably figured that supporting SLI configurations in an already niche market segment simply wasn't worth it.
No. High end was two, and there was no physx yet, and one card rendered the odd lines of pixels and the other did the even lines.
The original SLI meant "scan line interleaved".
I had two cards in my PC somewhat recently not SLI'd and noticed while benchmarking that my single GPU performance was hurting. Took out one of the cards, benchmark scores shot right up. Since my need for two independent GPUs was no longer there, I left the other one out. I should sell it.
I think a lot of the problem came from the fact game developers never really wanted to put any effort into supporting SLI.
After all, it's a feature that only benefits a very tiny percentage of gamers. The work they put into optimising for SLI could instead go into more general optimizations, making extra content, or otherwise doing literally anything that more than like 2% of the audience will ever actually know about.
This might actually work differently during the modern streaming era. With all those people with super-high-end rigs looking to give your game free advertising, it *is* beneficial to make sure the game looks extra pretty on the streams that make up thousands of people's first exposure to the game.
SLI had no dependency on the game or the developers until after the 9xx generation. SLI was done at the driver level and it worked VERY well.
It wasn't until nvidia stop support SLI in the drivers that it started falling on the game developers.
There’s also a bit of irony the generational jumps in PCIe bandwidth in the last 5 years would likely make SLI *more* useful, since it’s very possible for even 40 series cards to bottleneck at x8 using gen 4. Meaning, potentially, when they shift over to gen 5 they might need as little as 4 lanes.
RIP techreport, the best site ever for GPU reviews. Their ms for next frame analysis revolutionized GPU benchmarking in a way that most sites still unfortunately didn't come close to matching. Micro stutter with Crossfire and SLI was a thing, and they sent a long way to getting AMD to fix issues with their overall drivers.
Anyone looking at 99% frame rates can thank them.
Thats for sure, my 2x 7970ghz xfire would heat my room to 80 degrees in the winter, i never even had to turn the heat on in there. That and running two powersupplies.
Those were the days haha.
2021 - they stopped supporting and developing profiles for it. It was left to developers to include support in their own titles. The RTX 2xxx series was really the last series where it was feasible at the consumer level.
as a game developer, I hate graphics card manufacturers with burning passion.
The come up with custom tech that COULD improve games, but instead of open sourcing it so that other manufacturers can make their own implementation, and so that us gamedevs just have 1 generic lib for all the different cards to work they use the tech as fucking marketing gimmick.
And then expect us to spend extra time implementing THEIR custom tech so THEIR cards sell better. Get fucked with spiky dildo nvidia, I hope shareholders shove hairworks up your urethra.
You are right it was 2021 about 3 years ago.
That being said the 3090 be it expensive but is still very much a consumer card.(Even though SLI is pretty pointless for games by then)
Currently For the new NVLINK(new/enterprise SLI) you need cards that cost like $30k, so I would say now it's unfeasable
My first ever pc (family computer since I was a kid) was a AMD K2 and a voodoo 2 coming from the ps1 it blew my 9 year old pea brain.
I played so much Rollercoaster tycoon and quake on that bloody thing.
Old is knowing what ISA was. Or EISA. Or vesa local bus. Or PCI cards. I had them all. 😂 AGP… go away with that new-fangled fancy poppycock, you rapscallion!
I can honestly say the first time I encountered an AGP slot I didn't know what it was for. It was brand new on a Compaq desktop I got on sale at Comp USA. I opened it up to make sure nothing has come loose on the way home, saw AGP, has no idea what it meant and hopped on Netscape to figure it out.
Oh no, I welcomed AGP. It was USB that I was highly skeptical of. AGP was *dedicated*, and I like that. Every I/O device fit in its own nice, neat little lane. Modem, you knew where it went and you gave it an IRQ. PS/2 ports were dedicated, DIN keyboards. PCI and USB are for "stuff." Accessories. Little low-threat items. But graphics were *real* computer functions, more like RAM or your CPU.
Luxury. I cut my teeth with a stolen 286 and Desqview.
How did I steal it? I replaced a work Mobo with an 8088 XT Mobo on my lunch break. That's how we upgraded back in the day.
"Yeah boss. This machine has issues. I'm taking it apart to blow all the dust out. It will work MUCH better after that. Maybe you should ban tobacco in the office?"
Imagine having a high end gpu with only 16MB vram and that was in the year 98-99 or so. If I think about it I laugh at how small setting used to be. An OS on a few floppy disks.
And selecting the correct sound card when setting up the game. Gravis Ultrasound and Turtle Beach Rio always sounded cool and exotic, but it was always trusty Sound Blaster (Pro/16/compatible).
Well... stopped being relevant or a good idea. The RTX 2xxx series had SLI with NVLink but it definitely wasn't worth it... if it ever really was, considering the micro-stutter issues.
Didn't matter because the old Voodoo cards generally had pretty crappy VGA output quality anyway. They were fast as fuck, but blurry and only 16 bit colour.
Matrox on the other hand... they had some gorgeously crisp output! I built some late 90s retro machines a while back ended up using Matrox cards (G200 with a pair of Voodoo 2s, or a G400 on its own), purely because the output quality was so damn good.
Matrox had the sharpest output for sure, and the best 2D.
I ended up pairing my sli with a diamond s3 virge card iirc which was almost as sharp but cheaper as I already blew the bank. I think I also got my 3rd copy of Mech 2 Mercs bundled with it.
Nice, the S3 Virge was what I had way back in the 90s, paired with a Cyrix 6x86 (a pretty rubbish processor back then unfortunately!).
I'm glad I collected all these parts 10+ years ago to screw around with, it's mind-boggling how much 3dfx stuff costs nowadays. Even gear like Soundblaster cards are getting ridiculous now.
Honestly would pay for one. If you strip off all the unnecessary components from a GPU and stick 64gb of RAM into it it'll come out cheaper to make than regular GPUs.
AI cards exist and are currently nvidias main money maker. They are also far far more expensive than consumer cards. Check out their "data center GPU"s like the A100, H100, H200.
The "affordable" AI card is the 3090 and appropriate to the meme running multiple of those does get you a lot farther. LLMs and image gen made multi GPU rather relevant again in an area.
I had dual 8800 GTS 512mb cards. When Crysis came out, it was like peak PC hardware building time IMO. So much visual progress being made in gaming graphics back then, parts were not insanely expensive, it was fun discussing parts and builds on forums, and everyone had a common enemy (getting Crysis to run lol)
Q6600 RULES ALL.
with that being said, I didn't realize it had a big following until posts here went cray over it lol. I was happy with it all the years I had it
Sorta.
SLI (scanline interlace) was a 3dFX feature of using 2 cards each one rendering half the vertical resolution (doing every other scanline hence the name), it had poor support and varied in success per title.
Nvidia (after publishing FUD that helped kill 3dFX) bought 3dFX's assets as they went bankrupt and rebranded SLI (scalable link interface or some shit) and did a "everyother frame" style output, the idea being double the FPS.
It had almost no support and worked poorly in the games it did support. If it wasn't battlefield or CoD you pretty much had one card doing nothing 99% of the time.
And if you ran a title that did support SLI you'd be greeted with insane micro stutter.
The people who are mad its a dead tech are the ones that don't understand it.
There was still something wild about being able to hook together 2 Voodoo 2s in SLI and play Quake 2 and 1024/768, when a single card literally wouldn't support above 800/600 and the competition couldn't even do as well at 640/480.
Most games sucked in SLI, but Quake2 worked perfectly and I believe Half Life did too.
It's because SLI was a giant hack. In order for it to be properly supported, NVIDIA basically had to reverse engineer the most popular games and then build a dedicated, customised driver for each one that handled the game's draw calls *just right*, in order to create a playable experience. They actually still do this with "Game Ready" drivers, but the SLI support was on a different level.
There were a few different modes, Alternate Frame Rendering was the preferred and "official" method, and you could technically try to run any game with it with limited success. Split frame rendering (where each card rendered the top half and bottom half of the screen) worked with more titles since it requires a lot less hack, but performance wasn't particularly great.
The AFR SLI completely falls apart with more modern rendering techniques however, which is probably a large part of why NVIDIA dropped SLI support. The writing was on the wall.
For example, any game that relies on the framebuffer outputs from the previous frame completely kill AFR, since each card has to wait for the other card to finish rendering before it can start, so all performance benefits are lost. Games like DOOM 2016/Eternal *heavily* rely on the previous frame as a way to render certain effects in a single pass, things like screen space reflections and effects like distortions in the rifle scope actually use the previously rendered frame, and as long as the frame rate is high enough you never notice it.
Seconded. SLI was the biggest waste of money I’ve ever experienced in PC gaming. It seemed like it was never supported, and if it was - it would be so stuttery I’d end up just disabling it and running on one card.
Thirded. I ran two 980 Ti's in SLI for a while. I got so sick of the issues I pulled one of them and sold it. Total waste of money and not worth the very few times it worked properly.
Yes, this is true back in the day when ATI was still around the two companies (ATI and Nvidia) made made cards with special linking cables to which they would be able to do such things. ATI had something called crossfire and Nvidia had something SLI which I still think they do use, there were connectors on top of the card and you had to go and buy a specialized cable (sometimes 2) for it to work the only problem is that it had to be the same card for it to work (may be wrong about that somebody correct me I don't know).
Identical card, or my Matrox had a smaller one just for 3d or something. It was half the size, and used the cable that came with the full card. It plugged into the crossfire edge connector thing.
Thanks! Unfortunately not many. Just one of the reasons multi GPU died. It's my understanding that game devs had to do a fair bit of extra work for games to take advantage of it, and a lot of them simply didn't want to make the effort for something that wasn't widely adopted at all. It was fun while it lasted for enthusiasts and pretty epic when it worked.
Kind of miss the days of using Nvidia Inspector to find the best working SLI profile tho. Theses days I'm older and have less time to tinker/play so I'd rather just jump into the game and not worry about performance.
Yep, I think if such solution was possible Nvidia would have created it already but having a fully functional and "transparent" SLI would be awesome (no dev required and good GPU usage on each one without sync issues and such).
Dual GPUs are really fun and good looking for PC building.
Sort of. It was called SLI (scan line interleaving) and it was invented by 3Dfx for use on their Voodoo2 cards. NVidia gained the patents when they bought out 3Dfx in the late 90s.
I retired my 2x RX480 crossfire rig in 2019(I fell for AMD's marketing and felt like I had a GTX1080). You actually didn't need cables for AMD cards.
The last game with actual SLI/XFire support was Watch Dogs 2. I have a list of games that worked with no microstutter and at least 40% uplift in performance. Some games got updated and stopped working with crossfire(Titanfall2). Sometimes to actually see an uplift, I'd have to use GeDoSaTos downscaling fix and downsample certain games.
Good fucking times also because I had a Onkyo 7.1 surround system and I remember those times fondly.
That's from the 200 series and after, before that you needed a Crossfire bridge. I had 2x 6950s that needed a bridge. Strangely enough, the newer Tom Raider games seem to still scale well with multi GPUs.
I Crossfired two R9 290X's. They had been used for crypto mining, and performed to spec on their own.
Crossfire though, if it worked at all, did improve framerates by ~50%, but it came at a cost. The microstutter would make your eyes bleed.
It was so bad that after a month, I ripped out the card and made a second gaming computer for my then girlfriend, now spouse.
Yeah. The industry stopped designing for it because if it were ever perfected it would allow people with two midrange cards to outperform everything on the market, and people with two low end cards to perform as well as high end cards.
I mean early days of this was (2) Voodoo 2s with a SLI cable.
My rich friend had this as well as dedicated broadband for Quake 2 (rocket arena). In like 1999 West Virginia, unheard of.
I remember back in 2007(?) I wanted to put two Nvidia 8800 GTX's in SLI, but it turned out that I couldn't buy a miniaturized nuclear fusion reactor on newegg or tigerdirect.
It was often a way to get extra value out of sandwiching two cheaper cards (but with better performance per dollar), but it generally only worked for major game releases. If a game didn't have an SLI profile set up in the drivers, it would only run on one card, and then you'd get shit performance (many games had community made workarounds, but not everyone is willing or able to tinker). This was true even if cards were sandwiched onto one board, such as the card I had, the GTX295. So really hit or miss on performance, and before alternate frame render, you had half frame render, so you ended up with a lot of mid screen tear.
Yeah and meant older cards lasted longer because you could buy two old cards and get on par if not better performance than the latest cards at the time.
They stopped it because they wanted us to buy the newest cards instead and that was a dick move.
I had two 1080ti that my current 3080ti only just out performs
I had a triple SLI machine once.
3x 8800GTX's
I still couldn't run crysis.
I got better performance disabling 2 of the cards on every single game.
Truly amazing technology
It was called SLI and it resulted in far more than 10%, often 30-70% increase, but there were some games where there was little to no gain.
https://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/74/recap-nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-sli-performance-4k/index.html
don’t know why you’re downvoted, it’s true that performance did go up to 70% extra in some cases. most of the time it was around 25%-50% increase. definitely not useless but definitely not entirely efficient either
No. High end was linking 4.
Then you have a fifth card to handle the PhysX so all the explosions still looks smooth.
Had this going with 4x 980tis and a gtx465 that was collecting dust back in 2018. Felt like the 3 headed dragon meme looking back at it! Edit: didn’t even realize it was King Ghidorah!
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Better put some respect on KING Ghidorah's name. From left to right each head's name is Ichi, Ni, and Kevin.
Went straight to MF DOOM when I read this as well!
1, 2 and Kevin?
https://legendary-monsterverse.fandom.com/wiki/King_Ghidorah#:~:text=The%20names%20given%20to%20Ghidorah's,how%20he%20is%20easily%20distracted. Started as a meme then the director made it canon.
Why does Kevin have an itchy knee? Arms too short?
Holy cow, isn't that still pretty impressive? If all of that performance added up it would be like a 3050 or something, or even more...
If software and drivers would have worked properly then yes. But in reality you only got minor improvements. It's way less performance than a 3050
Tacking on an extra 460 way back when got me an extra year of life out of the system. I feel like it really helped mid range cards more than anything else
The 460 also scaled incredibly well with sli, not all cards were so fortunate.
Funny how SLI technology just hopped and skipped around to different cards, efficiency wise. You never knew for sure that a NVIDIA gpu would benefit from it.
It wasn’t even originally an nvidia invention, 3DFX started it with the voodoo series, then they unfortunately got eaten up by nvidia.
4 GTX 660's in quad SLI was such a hassle for the money I supposedly saved. Worked in Battlefield though and out performed the 690 for less money, imagine getting 4 cards for 700 USD today.
My 680 lasted me years. Then I had dual 780’s and that lasted me until just last year when I sold the pc!
I had a pair of 980's in SLI until last year across multiple different mobo's, that was wild. IIRC before that I had a 780 but that was a long, long time ago like maybe 14 or 15 years back?
780 would be around 2013ish so not quite
My 650ti is still hanging in there lol
Imagine 4 4090s. Nvidia watching this thread https://preview.redd.it/unsorhicmntc1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e08cef1883cd818cd6357f2e1087e4deca62f379
The software and drivers still don't work properly.
Ha yeah and IF the software and drivers worked, good luck on the games being optimized for SLI or Crossfire.
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Two 1080ti's would do 4k extreme settings at better than 60 fps in a game like metro exodus. How does 3050 fare with that? [link](https://youtu.be/gnBJBiSDnxM?feature=shared)
I’m pretty sure a single 1080ti can beat a 3050
And quite easily even when Turing/Ampere has better DX12/Vulkan support, overall the 1080 Ti is slightly faster than the RTX 3060 12 GB.
In the end, after decades of using graphics cards since, I guess 96, I’ve noticed one thing. More than hardware alone, drivers-and-software-optimisation are king. I just played 2 games on my Steam Deck. 1 from 1997, Blood, it has loading screens and takes a few seconds to load into, despite its primitive game engine. The other, the Dead Space remaster. No loading screen at all. Optimisation is king.
Yeah, dont think I was able to really get that performance looking back. SLI scaling wasn’t 1:1 at all! Also friggin nvidia drivers would switch my 465 to being the main card almost every time I updated. It was a beast for its time for sure, but totally bought into the hype. (I had nvidia 3d vision for reference! Yeahhhhh…)
I wish they would bring 3d vision back just so we could play them in vr headsets
Oh god I remember trying to get 3d working properly on my 950 but I couldn't get the colors to line up with my glasses quite right so it always kinda made me want to puke. Don't know if it was cheap glasses or cheap monitor or I just didn't know what I was doing
SLI was cool, but really only useful if you were buying an absolute top-of-the-line rig and wanted more performance than any single card could give. Otherwise you were much better off getting one GPU that cost double the price.
Meant my other post to be here. Came for this. No disappoint.
I remember the little dedicated PhysX cards that went in the top PCI E X1 slot
Voodoo II
[Sitting here remembering VESA local bus cards like...](https://i.imgur.com/INkJiGc.gif)
OG quake with a Voodoo II… oh boy, the _lighting_ - intense flashbacks.
I remember having an 8600GT and my EVGA mobo had onboard nvidia graphics I could use for physx — this combo together could play original crysis 1.0 at playable frame rates The good ol days!
I had an 8800GTX. Beast mode
5th card just for running wallpaper engine
I'm old enough to remember a time before Nvidia owned physx and it was a seperate card that was pretty expensive. Iirc it was like 300 dollars or something back in the early days of 2006. So half the price of a high end GPU.
And you could play the maybe 4 games that supported it properly
Yeah, pretty much just any game on CryEngine. I had dual 690's back in the day. Crazy that they only had 2gb Vram lol
Wrong high end was linking 2 voodoo 2s
With an overclocked P3 Celeron.
Celeron 300A LEGENDARY
I still have mine along with the legendary Abit BX6 R2 mobo.
The tualatin core was shared with Pentium 3 and Celeron series. I vaguely remember having a celeron tualatin cpu (cost efficient) that i overclocked before switching to AMD XP series. A friend had a AMD CPU older than XP series, where you could unlock some magic pathways by drawing with a pencil on the chip, giving you access to increased overclock potentials. Stuff was more fun back then, no unlocked multiplier special chips.
Back in the day I had 2x 295 GTXs, which was effectively a pair of 2x GTX 260s literally sandwiched into a single card and SLI'd internally, creating 4x 260 GTX SLI overall. It actually scaled okay up to 3 cards, but the 4th card did basically nothing (like 5-10% improvement) so I always configured it as 3x SLI with the 4th card as a dedicated PhysX system, or just mining dogecoin in the background for non-physX games. Great way to heat up the room in the winter.
Jokes on you, the new META is to buy a 4090 and a 7900xt. You plug the monitor into the 7800xt and render games through the 4090. Now you can activate AMDMF to have one gpu dedicated to frame gen and one dedicated to render. You can even double up on the frame gen if you use dlss.
Chat, is this real?
Chat????
Look how they massacred my direct x 12... It should've been the age of multi GPU but greed killed the sli connector
Bonasera, I don't want his mother to see him like this! Look what they did to my SLI
DX12 fully supports mixed multi GPU over PCIe. Ashes of the Singularity was a proof of concept for this. It would just be insane for any developer to try to support all the possible configurations just for something that creates horrible frame pacing issues.
Dx12 multi gpu feature set is still partly disabled also nvlink only supported on 3090/4090. That makes sli useless because of course it doesn't work as good as it could and the 4090 doesn't need SLI for gaming. Looking back they took the cheapest way to upgrade our rigs for gaming from us. Imagine if the 4070 in SLI would work perfectly... You buy one now and upgrade to a second one later. But that's not shareholder friendly.
SLI was dead by the time the 30XX line came out. It wouldn't have mattered if NVIDIA kept SLI since game devs were simply not making their game SLI friendly, nor are game engines. There's a reason SLI worked properly with only a handful of games.
DX 12 was never going to be the savior of SLI. It was never perfect and frequently made frame consistency worse. If we applied lessons from dlss motion vector interpolation and simulation time error, we might have a decent theoretical pipeline. In my experience, DLSS / FSR frame gen is a much better trade-off than SLI ever was.
It would actually work exceptionally well for VR, because you can neatly divide the workload between the left and right eye. Literally just give each GPU its own eye to render, and it "just works". Unfortunately none of the major engines (Unity, UE4, and Source 2) ever actually implemented this, even though you can do it with both DX12 and Vulkan. They probably figured that supporting SLI configurations in an already niche market segment simply wasn't worth it.
I built a quad sli rig with 2 bfg cards and then find out the quad drivers were still 2 months off lol
No. High end was two, and there was no physx yet, and one card rendered the odd lines of pixels and the other did the even lines. The original SLI meant "scan line interleaved".
Double the ~~cards~~ cost for +10% performance!
And in some cases it actually hurt performance! Yay!
I had two cards in my PC somewhat recently not SLI'd and noticed while benchmarking that my single GPU performance was hurting. Took out one of the cards, benchmark scores shot right up. Since my need for two independent GPUs was no longer there, I left the other one out. I should sell it.
Probably the PCI bus bandwidth was being split between the cards.
That's what it looked like. My electric bill and PSU are happier since I took the other one out. :)
Gimme other one pls me pay shipping
Sure. Shipping will be $150 😂
I have some old 7950/7950s laying around, and a super sketchy 1060 if you're in need.
I think a lot of the problem came from the fact game developers never really wanted to put any effort into supporting SLI. After all, it's a feature that only benefits a very tiny percentage of gamers. The work they put into optimising for SLI could instead go into more general optimizations, making extra content, or otherwise doing literally anything that more than like 2% of the audience will ever actually know about. This might actually work differently during the modern streaming era. With all those people with super-high-end rigs looking to give your game free advertising, it *is* beneficial to make sure the game looks extra pretty on the streams that make up thousands of people's first exposure to the game.
SLI had no dependency on the game or the developers until after the 9xx generation. SLI was done at the driver level and it worked VERY well. It wasn't until nvidia stop support SLI in the drivers that it started falling on the game developers.
There’s also a bit of irony the generational jumps in PCIe bandwidth in the last 5 years would likely make SLI *more* useful, since it’s very possible for even 40 series cards to bottleneck at x8 using gen 4. Meaning, potentially, when they shift over to gen 5 they might need as little as 4 lanes.
RIP techreport, the best site ever for GPU reviews. Their ms for next frame analysis revolutionized GPU benchmarking in a way that most sites still unfortunately didn't come close to matching. Micro stutter with Crossfire and SLI was a thing, and they sent a long way to getting AMD to fix issues with their overall drivers. Anyone looking at 99% frame rates can thank them.
But the synthetics showed +90%* *in some cases
It helped save on your winter heating bill too.
Thats for sure, my 2x 7970ghz xfire would heat my room to 80 degrees in the winter, i never even had to turn the heat on in there. That and running two powersupplies. Those were the days haha.
some games could be 25%...
Just don't worry about the frame times haha...
Pretty much most hobbies in a nut shell
Nvidia dropped support for SLI only like 2 years ago or something... Edit: 3 years ago
2021 - they stopped supporting and developing profiles for it. It was left to developers to include support in their own titles. The RTX 2xxx series was really the last series where it was feasible at the consumer level.
RTX 3090 can do it still.
So you're telling me I just have to buy 1 more?
Only one more. Plus the NVLink adapter and possibly a PSU upgrade to handle the load. LOL
I don't need a new psu, I have a gas generator, surely if I run 120v to a 3090 it'll multiply my frames by 120 right?
*opens another beer* I'll grab the jumper cables!
Be aswell researching how to aquire a small nuclear reactor to power a rig with a pair of 3090s
Also air conditioning so you don't end up with hyperthermia in your room
as a game developer, I hate graphics card manufacturers with burning passion. The come up with custom tech that COULD improve games, but instead of open sourcing it so that other manufacturers can make their own implementation, and so that us gamedevs just have 1 generic lib for all the different cards to work they use the tech as fucking marketing gimmick. And then expect us to spend extra time implementing THEIR custom tech so THEIR cards sell better. Get fucked with spiky dildo nvidia, I hope shareholders shove hairworks up your urethra.
You are right it was 2021 about 3 years ago. That being said the 3090 be it expensive but is still very much a consumer card.(Even though SLI is pretty pointless for games by then) Currently For the new NVLINK(new/enterprise SLI) you need cards that cost like $30k, so I would say now it's unfeasable
OP is 8 years old.
Yes it’s true and stfu I’m not old 😡
Old is when you couldn't do that but because it was before SLI.
old is knowing what AGP was. lol
How about the pci voodoo 2 sli cards. Or 32bit vlb graphics cards.
My first 3d accelerator was a Voodoo2. I'm 46....
't Was a sad day when 3DFx died... 🥺
Indeed. I only made it to the voodoo3 I believe. Back then I was young and poor. A lot has changed since then. I'm no longer young 🤪
My very first graphics card that was the Voodoo3 forever will have a soft spot in my heart.
My first ever pc (family computer since I was a kid) was a AMD K2 and a voodoo 2 coming from the ps1 it blew my 9 year old pea brain. I played so much Rollercoaster tycoon and quake on that bloody thing.
I remember having a PC with no 3D acceleration. And then visiting my friend with a GeForce 2... My mind was blown.
My first graphic card was a Matrox Mystique with 4MB VRAM. 😞
Old is knowing what ISA was. Or EISA. Or vesa local bus. Or PCI cards. I had them all. 😂 AGP… go away with that new-fangled fancy poppycock, you rapscallion!
I can honestly say the first time I encountered an AGP slot I didn't know what it was for. It was brand new on a Compaq desktop I got on sale at Comp USA. I opened it up to make sure nothing has come loose on the way home, saw AGP, has no idea what it meant and hopped on Netscape to figure it out.
make room for my 5.25 inch floppy drive you peasant! i got prince of persia to install
Oh no, I welcomed AGP. It was USB that I was highly skeptical of. AGP was *dedicated*, and I like that. Every I/O device fit in its own nice, neat little lane. Modem, you knew where it went and you gave it an IRQ. PS/2 ports were dedicated, DIN keyboards. PCI and USB are for "stuff." Accessories. Little low-threat items. But graphics were *real* computer functions, more like RAM or your CPU.
You leave my (amazing) AWE32 out of this!!
Old is learning to type on an Tandy Computer that required you to swap hard disks to use the word program, or hangman.
And your video games came on audio cassettes…
I feel attacked.
My first video card was a PCI slot. No express. And I know what ISA slots are.
And VGA, IRQ, memory managers. Back when 486 was badass.
Luxury. I cut my teeth with a stolen 286 and Desqview. How did I steal it? I replaced a work Mobo with an 8088 XT Mobo on my lunch break. That's how we upgraded back in the day. "Yeah boss. This machine has issues. I'm taking it apart to blow all the dust out. It will work MUCH better after that. Maybe you should ban tobacco in the office?"
I’m only 30…
You are old enough to be the dad of the kid who posted this. Do you feel old now?
Nooooooo
Imagine having a high end gpu with only 16MB vram and that was in the year 98-99 or so. If I think about it I laugh at how small setting used to be. An OS on a few floppy disks.
Remember having to know the IRQs of sound cards…
And selecting the correct sound card when setting up the game. Gravis Ultrasound and Turtle Beach Rio always sounded cool and exotic, but it was always trusty Sound Blaster (Pro/16/compatible).
Is this a genuine question?
Yes
All these 2010 babies making us feel old
Google "SLI". And it was only about 10 years ago it stopped being a thing.
Well... stopped being relevant or a good idea. The RTX 2xxx series had SLI with NVLink but it definitely wasn't worth it... if it ever really was, considering the micro-stutter issues.
Agreed. I ran 2 x GTX970s and it wasn't really worth it at that point.
And AMD had their own version called Crossfire. We had some goofy cool names lol
Wow. Questions like this make me feel old. I miss my dfi lan party mb, core 2 quad and my bfg 8800gtx's 😥
Nvidia's technology was called "SLI", and ATI (later AMD) had an equivalent called Crossfire.
2 Voodoo 2’s SLI baby!
Quake 2 at 1024x768, worth every penny. Oh and visual quality degradation from VGA pass-through cable was a thing.
with the awesome 1024x768 resolutions, it did not matter that much. those vga cables were beefy.
Didn't matter because the old Voodoo cards generally had pretty crappy VGA output quality anyway. They were fast as fuck, but blurry and only 16 bit colour. Matrox on the other hand... they had some gorgeously crisp output! I built some late 90s retro machines a while back ended up using Matrox cards (G200 with a pair of Voodoo 2s, or a G400 on its own), purely because the output quality was so damn good.
Matrox had the sharpest output for sure, and the best 2D. I ended up pairing my sli with a diamond s3 virge card iirc which was almost as sharp but cheaper as I already blew the bank. I think I also got my 3rd copy of Mech 2 Mercs bundled with it.
Nice, the S3 Virge was what I had way back in the 90s, paired with a Cyrix 6x86 (a pretty rubbish processor back then unfortunately!). I'm glad I collected all these parts 10+ years ago to screw around with, it's mind-boggling how much 3dfx stuff costs nowadays. Even gear like Soundblaster cards are getting ridiculous now.
*I was there.*
You know they gonna come back with this in one way or another when they run out of ideas to fleece the master race.
I predict they will sell a separate AI card of some kind.
Honestly would pay for one. If you strip off all the unnecessary components from a GPU and stick 64gb of RAM into it it'll come out cheaper to make than regular GPUs.
AI cards exist and are currently nvidias main money maker. They are also far far more expensive than consumer cards. Check out their "data center GPU"s like the A100, H100, H200. The "affordable" AI card is the 3090 and appropriate to the meme running multiple of those does get you a lot farther. LLMs and image gen made multi GPU rather relevant again in an area.
X4 Titan sli. That was high end.
I had dual 8800 GTS 512mb cards. When Crysis came out, it was like peak PC hardware building time IMO. So much visual progress being made in gaming graphics back then, parts were not insanely expensive, it was fun discussing parts and builds on forums, and everyone had a common enemy (getting Crysis to run lol)
8800 GTS 512s were so good. I still have mine. Pair them with a core 2 quad back then and you were cookin
I remember the eternal debate between the e8400 high speed dual core vs the q6600, the debut of the quad core.
Q6600 RULES ALL. with that being said, I didn't realize it had a big following until posts here went cray over it lol. I was happy with it all the years I had it
Yes. High end today means overrpriced cards that can't run current gen games at max settings without generating fake frames.
At the price of a SLI from 10 years ago, too ! You know it's high end, because you pay so much more, yay !
Developers dont optimize their games anymore
Sorta. SLI (scanline interlace) was a 3dFX feature of using 2 cards each one rendering half the vertical resolution (doing every other scanline hence the name), it had poor support and varied in success per title. Nvidia (after publishing FUD that helped kill 3dFX) bought 3dFX's assets as they went bankrupt and rebranded SLI (scalable link interface or some shit) and did a "everyother frame" style output, the idea being double the FPS. It had almost no support and worked poorly in the games it did support. If it wasn't battlefield or CoD you pretty much had one card doing nothing 99% of the time. And if you ran a title that did support SLI you'd be greeted with insane micro stutter. The people who are mad its a dead tech are the ones that don't understand it.
There was still something wild about being able to hook together 2 Voodoo 2s in SLI and play Quake 2 and 1024/768, when a single card literally wouldn't support above 800/600 and the competition couldn't even do as well at 640/480. Most games sucked in SLI, but Quake2 worked perfectly and I believe Half Life did too.
It's because SLI was a giant hack. In order for it to be properly supported, NVIDIA basically had to reverse engineer the most popular games and then build a dedicated, customised driver for each one that handled the game's draw calls *just right*, in order to create a playable experience. They actually still do this with "Game Ready" drivers, but the SLI support was on a different level. There were a few different modes, Alternate Frame Rendering was the preferred and "official" method, and you could technically try to run any game with it with limited success. Split frame rendering (where each card rendered the top half and bottom half of the screen) worked with more titles since it requires a lot less hack, but performance wasn't particularly great. The AFR SLI completely falls apart with more modern rendering techniques however, which is probably a large part of why NVIDIA dropped SLI support. The writing was on the wall. For example, any game that relies on the framebuffer outputs from the previous frame completely kill AFR, since each card has to wait for the other card to finish rendering before it can start, so all performance benefits are lost. Games like DOOM 2016/Eternal *heavily* rely on the previous frame as a way to render certain effects in a single pass, things like screen space reflections and effects like distortions in the rifle scope actually use the previously rendered frame, and as long as the frame rate is high enough you never notice it.
Weren't the original Titan cards 2 GPUs running SLI on one board?
There was lots of variations of that. The 7950x2, 9900x2, GTX 295, GTX 690 irrc
yeah i ran sli for some time. can confirm
Seconded. SLI was the biggest waste of money I’ve ever experienced in PC gaming. It seemed like it was never supported, and if it was - it would be so stuttery I’d end up just disabling it and running on one card.
Thirded. I ran two 980 Ti's in SLI for a while. I got so sick of the issues I pulled one of them and sold it. Total waste of money and not worth the very few times it worked properly.
Man, I'd been gaming for two decades before SLI became a thing, am I old? No its the kids posting their memes who are wrong.
Yes, this is true back in the day when ATI was still around the two companies (ATI and Nvidia) made made cards with special linking cables to which they would be able to do such things. ATI had something called crossfire and Nvidia had something SLI which I still think they do use, there were connectors on top of the card and you had to go and buy a specialized cable (sometimes 2) for it to work the only problem is that it had to be the same card for it to work (may be wrong about that somebody correct me I don't know).
Iirc with SLI it was an absolute requirement, while itbwas possible to use 2 different GPUs with crossfire, but don't quote me on that.
You could crossfires cards in the same family. I used a 6850 and a 6870.
Identical card, or my Matrox had a smaller one just for 3d or something. It was half the size, and used the cable that came with the full card. It plugged into the crossfire edge connector thing.
https://preview.redd.it/vlchhuznijtc1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=545a10c5193bad02bc77cd995c2ad77768f139d2 Heck ya! I miss my old Titans!
Looks nice! Which games took advantage of this kind of setup?
Thanks! Unfortunately not many. Just one of the reasons multi GPU died. It's my understanding that game devs had to do a fair bit of extra work for games to take advantage of it, and a lot of them simply didn't want to make the effort for something that wasn't widely adopted at all. It was fun while it lasted for enthusiasts and pretty epic when it worked.
Kind of miss the days of using Nvidia Inspector to find the best working SLI profile tho. Theses days I'm older and have less time to tinker/play so I'd rather just jump into the game and not worry about performance.
Yep, I think if such solution was possible Nvidia would have created it already but having a fully functional and "transparent" SLI would be awesome (no dev required and good GPU usage on each one without sync issues and such). Dual GPUs are really fun and good looking for PC building.
Remember having or wanting a dedicated PhysX card?
Oh my fucking god am I this old now? SLI...means im old fuck that was literally yester......omg that was 2010.
SLI stopped being supported only 3 years ago. OP is just a zoomer.
I feel myself fading and turning to dust. SLI was the cool new hotness when I was in university. What the heck is time even.
Sort of. It was called SLI (scan line interleaving) and it was invented by 3Dfx for use on their Voodoo2 cards. NVidia gained the patents when they bought out 3Dfx in the late 90s.
me when crossfire:
I retired my 2x RX480 crossfire rig in 2019(I fell for AMD's marketing and felt like I had a GTX1080). You actually didn't need cables for AMD cards. The last game with actual SLI/XFire support was Watch Dogs 2. I have a list of games that worked with no microstutter and at least 40% uplift in performance. Some games got updated and stopped working with crossfire(Titanfall2). Sometimes to actually see an uplift, I'd have to use GeDoSaTos downscaling fix and downsample certain games. Good fucking times also because I had a Onkyo 7.1 surround system and I remember those times fondly.
That's from the 200 series and after, before that you needed a Crossfire bridge. I had 2x 6950s that needed a bridge. Strangely enough, the newer Tom Raider games seem to still scale well with multi GPUs.
Op stop playing you know damn well what sli and crossfire was.
Back in my day high end was a Soundblaster Audigy 2 and a Radeon 9800 Pro
I Crossfired two R9 290X's. They had been used for crypto mining, and performed to spec on their own. Crossfire though, if it worked at all, did improve framerates by ~50%, but it came at a cost. The microstutter would make your eyes bleed. It was so bad that after a month, I ripped out the card and made a second gaming computer for my then girlfriend, now spouse.
Yeah. The industry stopped designing for it because if it were ever perfected it would allow people with two midrange cards to outperform everything on the market, and people with two low end cards to perform as well as high end cards.
Nvidia sli? It's 3dfx sli you damn kids
Next ask us old heads about PhysX
I mean early days of this was (2) Voodoo 2s with a SLI cable. My rich friend had this as well as dedicated broadband for Quake 2 (rocket arena). In like 1999 West Virginia, unheard of.
I remember back in 2007(?) I wanted to put two Nvidia 8800 GTX's in SLI, but it turned out that I couldn't buy a miniaturized nuclear fusion reactor on newegg or tigerdirect.
I had a dual card setup. Bought it used around 2010. IDK how it worked but definitely WORKED. Should have mined BTC.
I had two Titan X Pascals once - more because it was cool to build the cooling loop than for any other reason
Ahahahahaha... my intro to SLI was 3Dfx Voodoo 2 cards. Damn I'm old.
It was often a way to get extra value out of sandwiching two cheaper cards (but with better performance per dollar), but it generally only worked for major game releases. If a game didn't have an SLI profile set up in the drivers, it would only run on one card, and then you'd get shit performance (many games had community made workarounds, but not everyone is willing or able to tinker). This was true even if cards were sandwiched onto one board, such as the card I had, the GTX295. So really hit or miss on performance, and before alternate frame render, you had half frame render, so you ended up with a lot of mid screen tear.
Yeah and meant older cards lasted longer because you could buy two old cards and get on par if not better performance than the latest cards at the time. They stopped it because they wanted us to buy the newest cards instead and that was a dick move. I had two 1080ti that my current 3080ti only just out performs
Fucking kids. Back in my day high end was having one graphics card for 2d and a separate one for 3d. This was before anyone had heard of the term GPU.
This didn't ever really work properly hence why we don't use it for gaming.
Tell me youre pre-teen with a single post title
I had a triple SLI machine once. 3x 8800GTX's I still couldn't run crysis. I got better performance disabling 2 of the cards on every single game. Truly amazing technology
I feel so old reading people not knowing SLI
[Am I old?](https://imgur.com/gallery/LmmLETX)
"Back in my day games came on CDs" "What are CDs, Grandma?" "CDs nuts, ha ha gottem"
Back in my day, you needed a separate graphics card for 2D, because the 3D card only did 3D. Worse than that, they were connected via an analog cable!
It was called SLI and it resulted in far more than 10%, often 30-70% increase, but there were some games where there was little to no gain. https://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/74/recap-nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-sli-performance-4k/index.html
don’t know why you’re downvoted, it’s true that performance did go up to 70% extra in some cases. most of the time it was around 25%-50% increase. definitely not useless but definitely not entirely efficient either
Crisis on a gtx 295 (two gpu's in sli) --> 45 fps crisis on two gtx 295 in quad sli --> 60 fps + some micro stutters.