[PCPer] No more 3way or 4way SLI profiles for games

[flynnsk]

For the 100th time, RX480 is an HD7850/7870 replacement. It was never designed to compete with or outperform a GTX670/680 replacement card (that's 1070/1080). For the latter part of your post, it's factually incorrect. AMD held the performance crown with 9800XT, X800XT PE/X850XT PE, X1900XTX/X1950XTX, HD7970Ghz and using latest benchmarks R9 290X vs. 780Ti. It's also unrealistic to expect AMD to release a 230ish mm2 chip for $199 that beats NV's 314mm2 $379-449 chip. AMD would not leave $100-200 MSRP on the table like that for a faster chip.



That's not what they said. They insinuated that 3-way and 4-way SLI was going to work with a special Enthusiast Key but I could already tell it meant beyond 2-way SLI on 1070/1080 was not going to work well with games from that statement. Still, it is a change of marketing statement from what they said during the launch.



Factually incorrect again. NV never flat out state that the Enthusiast Key will not allow 3-way and 4-way SLI to work in games. It was implicit in their statements that the key would unlock 3/4-way capability in any apps where NV's driver was coded to take advantage of the extra cards. Now, they are flat out saying that they won't even code the driver for any game specifically for 3/4-way SLI. That's the difference you are missing.



Yup, he is just spinning it, doing his usual PR damage control. More signs nothing on the GPU industry that comes out of his this poster can be taken with any seriousness. The entire forum is better off putting him on ignore.





It would be smart of them to re-enable at least 3-way SLI on GP102 cards. This way even if they charge $799-899 for GTX1080Ti, there will instantly be gamers who'll buy upgrade from 1080 SLI to 3x 1080Tis because it would have been cheaper than 4x980Tis/Titan X's last gen. If NV is smart, they will do this.

In fairness, I think it's more fitting to focus on 2-way SLI than to have poor SLI support overall. I also think it's better to leave 3-4 way SLI to true flagships of a generation - 1080 isn't that product. What will be interesting to see is if all the gamers who bought 3-4 way SLI for years for supposedly superior gaming performance will now go AMD 4-way Vega if NV limits all of their cards to 2-way SLI only. :sneaky:



7970/Ghz was in the lead from June 2012 until May 2013 when 780 showed up. I am not including $1000 rip-off OG Titan as that was $ flushed right into the toilet. X1950XT series vs. 7900 series was also no contest, especially in shader intensive modern games at the time. AMD/ATI also had superior MSAA IQ for years.



NV's loyal customer will take this news as NV is re-doubling its efforts on 2-way SLI because they guys working on 3-4 way SLI will have more time devoted to 2-way SLI specifically. If this becomes true, we won't know for a while but in theory it makes sense. I think 2-way SLI is still very important. I am strongly considering getting 1070 SLI as 1080 seems like a rip-off and wouldn't even be an upgrade for me. In 5 years or so, I think unless things change, once GPUs become fast enough for 4K, multi-GPU might go away completely.

^^^

Point On

 

[Shmee]

What a pity this is. Though, to be fair, DX12 and vulcan could still save the multi GPU platform, and recently 3 and 4 way crossfire has scaled better anyway due to XDMA.

Still, I would hope that Nvidia could be a bit more innovative than this with their SLI tech, and have better customer service.

 

[thilanliyan]

And it will work in games, too. nVidia will only provide tuned profiles for those applications. You can manually turn it on within the control panel.

This would work for DX12 games too or only for DX11?

 

[Headfoot]

IIRC you can still provide for the driver to handle most of the multi-gpu scaling in DX12 provided you are using the Implicit multi-adapter feature, not the more talked about explicit multi adapter feature.

How many developers will actually go down that path, who knows.

 

[Final8ty]

Didn't 3x and 4x barely work most of the time anyway?

This isn't a big deal, but I'm sure it will be spun into a ****storm by this board full of people running 4x 980ti's and only ever running benchmarks on them.

My QuadFire 5970 was fantastic for me and my favorite so far.


2560x1600 1x5970 Ares CF 2x5970 Ares quadfire Ares 5970+5870 TriFire


The review is old and so are the drivers, much has changed since then, but that's basically my Quadfire setup at the time.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/ARES_CrossFire/1.html



19 games tested some of them with no AA which does not help eliminate CPU bottlenecking which is running at 3.8Ghz., the more GPUs you have the greater the potential driver overhead.


Out of 19 games tested Quadfire is ahead of TriFire in 14 of them and about equal in the rest.


Out of 19 games tested Quadfire negative scales to worse than CF in 2 by a tiny margin.


Quadfire negative scales to 3 frames worse 138.6 fps than CF 141.9 fps in CODMW.


Quadfire negative scales to 2 frames worse 224.3 fps than CF 226.3 fps in Quake4 No AA

 

[selni]

The problem with just adding more compute units is that manufacturing processes are reaching the land of diminishing returns, unless there are some new breakthroughs in chip designs. The rumors are pointing toward AMD moving toward multiple smaller GPU dies on a single package with Navi after Vega.

Sure but consoles are a long way off hitting that. They're under 350mm on 28nm for the entire APU and due for a die shrink. Maybe in a couple of console generations if manufacturing does stall out completely, but not anytime soon.

 

[Elixer]

And it will work in games, too. nVidia will only provide tuned profiles for those applications. You can manually turn it on within the control panel.

What good would "manually turning it on" do? Why do you think they are forced to make "profiles" for the games anyway?
They don't do it for fun, since they need to tune it to use all resources correctly, and just "manually turning it on" is basically rolling the dice.

 

[3DVagabond]

nVidia was very clear from the beginning that 3-4 way SLI will not be supported out of the box:
https://youtu.be/yvJJ4jilxcY?t=429

And it will work in games, too. nVidia will only provide tuned profiles for those applications. You can manually turn it on within the control panel.

But i guess you can show as a few links where nVidia has promised to provide profiles for games to support 3-4 way SLI...

It's a reduction in customer service. Insult to injury when they are charging an early adopters tax as well.

 

[3DVagabond]

That is what you have to do to get your stock to go up 50% per year. Yes, NVDA has literally gone up by 50% per year the last 3 years.

It's more because their stock has gone up rather than why their stock has gone up.

 

[NTMBK]

The problem with just adding more compute units is that manufacturing processes are reaching the land of diminishing returns, unless there are some new breakthroughs in chip designs. The rumors are pointing toward AMD moving toward multiple smaller GPU dies on a single package with Navi after Vega.

But multiple dies on an interposer making up a single GPU, with a single unified front end, is a very different thing to multiple GPUs.

 

[Jacky60]

As long as we can still use 2 GPUs I'm happy. At 4k there's still no single GPU that can give me the performance I need.

 

[bystander36]

My QuadFire 5970 was fantastic for me and my favorite so far.


2560x1600 1x5970 Ares CF 2x5970 Ares quadfire Ares 5970+5870 TriFire


The review is old and so are the drivers, much has changed since then, but that's basically my Quadfire setup at the time.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/ARES_CrossFire/1.html



19 games tested some of them with no AA which does not help eliminate CPU bottlenecking which is running at 3.8Ghz., the more GPUs you have the greater the potential driver overhead.


Out of 19 games tested Quadfire is ahead of TriFire in 14 of them and about equal in the rest.


Out of 19 games tested Quadfire negative scales to worse than CF in 2 by a tiny margin.


Quadfire negative scales to 3 frames worse 138.6 fps than CF 141.9 fps in CODMW.


Quadfire negative scales to 2 frames worse 224.3 fps than CF 226.3 fps in Quake4 No AA

The issues that come with it aren't completely measured in FPS. In 4-way Crossfire, your latency is 4 times what a single GPU would get at those FPS, and the inconsistent frame times, especially in that time period, was really bad.

Given the scaling of 2-way GPU's, you may gain a bit, but as you go with more, it's hard to say you actually gain in the quality of the experience.

 

[24601]

The issues that come with it aren't completely measured in FPS. In 4-way Crossfire, your latency is 4 times what a single GPU would get at those FPS, and the inconsistent frame times, especially in that time period, was really bad.

Given the scaling of 2-way GPU's, you may gain a bit, but as you go with more, it's hard to say you actually gain in the quality of the experience.

AFR was always a downgrade in interactive media.

That people weren't able to know that for this long is absolutely laughable.

AFR is great...... if you are rendering a movie.

 

[bystander36]

AFR was always a downgrade in interactive media.

That people weren't able to know that for this long is absolutely laughable.

AFR is great...... if you are rendering a movie.

If you get perfect scaling, AFR is still better, as you'd have double the FPS, making latency times equal, but with double the input points. But somewhere below that, it starts to no longer be worth it. I'd guess you need at least 50% scaling for it to be worth it, assuming consistent frame times. 3-way and 4-way definitely seem to not be worth it, but 2-way can have a decent case for using.

 

[UaVaj]

While 2x1080 is good enough to get over 60fps average in most DX11 games at 4K, people going 5K or 3x1440 multi-display are SOL. Likewise, those minimum frames still aren't above 60fps in many scenarios. I dunno... seems like a bad time to pull support for it. I'd like to think that pulling back support for 3/4-way means that their 2-way SLI will be amazing, but that remains to be seen.

if this is also true for amd. three dell u3014 will be for sale.

 

[Final8ty]

The issues that come with it aren't completely measured in FPS. In 4-way Crossfire, your latency is 4 times what a single GPU would get at those FPS, and the inconsistent frame times, especially in that time period, was really bad.

Given the scaling of 2-way GPU's, you may gain a bit, but as you go with more, it's hard to say you actually gain in the quality of the experience.

The point was specifically about scaling not possible other issues and i have provided information about the scaling and seeing as i have been running quad and tri GPU since the 3870s only 2 games that i have played were better with 2 GPUs rather then 3 or 4 in my personal experience with crossfire.

 

[bystander36]

The point was specifically about scaling not possible other issues and i have provided information about the scaling and seeing as i have been running quad and tri GPU since the 3870s only 2 games that i have played where better with 2 GPUs rather then 3 or 4 in my personal experience with crossfire.

You only talked about FPS or performance. While I'm sure every one but those 2 had more FPS, that doesn't necessarily equal a better experience. Each GPU adds negatives too, such as latency and uneven frame times. It seems people have a tendency to ignore the negatives and focus very heavily on that FPS number.

 

[Final8ty]

You only talked about FPS or performance. While I'm sure every one but those 2 had more FPS, that doesn't necessarily equal a better experience. Each GPU adds negatives too, such as latency and uneven frame times. It seems people have a tendency to ignore the negatives and focus very heavily on that FPS number.

It was a better experience for me and if others are happy with there 3/4 way experience what does it matter, people don't need to be told if something feels worse for them, if 3/4 way feels worse for them then they would not use 3/4 no one is forcing them to spend the money and use 3/4 way, its just a few clicks of the mouse to go from 3/4 way to 2 way and as i said for me only 2 games felt better for me with 2 way.

Its upto the individual to whether the possible negatives are important to them and to what degree.

 

[BFG10K]

But i guess you can show as a few links where nVidia has promised to provide profiles for games to support 3-4 way SLI...

They promised to provide a code and a website to activate it, but now we're told neither will happen.

As an aside I've always thought CF/SLI was a waste of GPU driver resources. It's one of the most complex forms of software engineering in existence, yet it only benefits a tiny fraction of the user base, and still often has issues.

I think both vendors should scrub even 2-way and focus entirely on making the best single-GPU experience possible.

 

[sxr7171]

GTX980 and lower etc only allow two way sli. However given the shaft, i mean the price of the 1080 which is but a pascal midrange chip, i thought it would be at least a good deal if people could triple sli at the least. PR damage control is out doing its job quite handily or so it seems here.

At $1800-$2100 I'm not seeing any good deal here.

 

[SolMiester]

What terrible terrible support. They are actually charging an extra hundy per card as an early adopter tax and they can't even offer full SLI support. They wring their customers out for more and more and give them less and less.

Personally, I think 18mth wait for working CF is worse.

 

[3DVagabond]

Personally, I think 18mth wait for working CF is worse.

Apples and oranges.