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Although the market for those running more than two graphics cards in SLI was always rather small, there's still likely to be a few people disappointed that native support for three and four card set ups will not be supported by the Nvidia 10 series GPUs.
Of course when performance is as high as Nvidia claims with the new-generation of cards, it shouldn't matter too much. Purportedly a single GTX 1080 will be able to beat out two 980s in SLI and even the monstrous Titan X. It might prove problematic for those looking to break 3Dmark records and big system sellers though.
The new SLI bridges are certainly optimised for two cards. Sourced: VideoCardz
This news actually came out of Nvidia's conference last week but most people seemed to miss it. Indeed it was TechofTomorrow on Youtube who broke the news, highlighting how in his experience this shouldn't make much of a difference, as three and four cards set ups were not good value for money anyway. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWvmt9wk0n4&feature=youtu.be&t=7m7s']
Jump to seven minutes in to hear the particular announcement.
The fact that “native” support isn't planned for the 10 series drivers doesn't mean it won't be possible with a few tweaks, or even straight out of the box. It just means that Nvidia won't be going out of its way to fix any problems it discovers with three and four card set ups. It seems likely that 3+ card scaling won't be great either without optimisations.
Although this might seem like a shame, if Nvidia puts all its eggs in the two-card basket, perhaps it can optimise performance in those scenarios. That may be extra important too, considering VR has the potential to see much greater benefits from two card set ups, since each one can render for a single eye.
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KitGuru Says: How many of you have ever run more than two cards in SLI? Personally I've never even run two. It's always just made more sense to buy a card from a newer generation.
Jay will be disappointed…
If you listen to him he just says it won’t be supported. You can still try, but it just sounds like this is Nvidia’s catch-all so when SLI users with more than two cards complain about crap performance they can just walk away since they no longer support it.
3 way and 4 way SLI is total waste of time and money, I had a 3 card setup once, games actually ran worse in 3 way than they did with 2 way, with the new SLI bridge, a 2 card setup will be the best option, and should easily handle 4k resolution, with the right monitor and connections ofc.
So will lots of top-end PC makers!!! 😀
Now we understand why. Even SLI is exclusive to few PC Enthousiast’s. It’s not rare to see bad (or no real) SLI profiles for many games.
I wondered why there were two SLI ‘prongs’ (Not sure of the technical term) on the PCB, I guess they’re just for higher data transfer rates between two cards. Snazzy bridge though.
less than 5% use dual SLI and probably less than 1% use 3-4 way SLI so does it matter?
If any and all games have no idea what to do with it, it’s kind of moot.
For that we mainly blame the graphics engines and the devs behind each one that did not code with multiGPUs in mind.
3 and 4 way SLi will be supported your information is flat out wrong !! You will see just wait for the NDA to lift.
source?
Actually it is not always the dev’s fault. Sometimes the driver teams don’t work with them. And yes it takes both working together. The driver teams *have* to be selective like this due to limited resources.
There has been an AMD Crossfire API released as open source lately explaining how to code for AFR in mind.
The day i stopped trusting anything coming out kitguru, Great full of shit information!!
There was this, but it the lack of popularity caused many websites to not spread it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t probable, just unpopular. http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/38134-crossfire-and-sli-market-is-just-300-000-units
You can’t blame for that. Time consuming for few users :s
Kitguru, I need to make a correction with your article here.
A single GTX 1080 does *NOT* beat 980 SLI unless a game is running in VR, where SLI scaling is limited to about 50% or less. It does beat a Titan X, but 980 SLI still murders it.
Why do you say that?
why not get a single dual gpu card ??
Smells defeat for nVidia. You abandon what you are bad at, and most tests show that AMD is better in 3 or 4 GPUs in same system, so…