Could Multi-GPUs Make A Comeback?

[@AshtonCoolman]

Anything that requires game developers to put in EXTRA EFFORT is basically DOA. They still release unfinished and unoptimized games to this day. Look at Monster Hunter 😂

[@arenzricodexd4409]

That's why i said back then making multi gpu support native to 3D API like DX12 or Vulkan will be the final nail for multi gpu in games.

[@KeradSnake]

cool story bro. You know it's a Open Beta right? If I were to follow your logic, Battlefield 1 was unoptimized as all hell for that freezing headless dead body bug and flying tank back in 2016 when it was still at Open Beta

[@interrobangings]

I miss SLI. Two 980 TIs was absolutely BEASTLY back then.

[@pmcomputing2459]

When SLI worked it was amazing, I remember having dual GTX 295's in SLI way back when. The gtx 295 was already a dual gpu card, so essentially quad sli on 2 cards, it was insanely fast at the time.

[@martinxyz]

I have a very fond memories of playing Battlefield 1 on my SLI setup. I had 760 back then and to play BF1 i have bought second used 760 instead of expensive 900 series. It was a very good decision from the time perspective

[@LurchNZ]

1080's SLI was amazing, miss my old system. Voodoo 3dfx was the best jump in tech ever, nothing has given that same buzz since.

[@eTeknix]

@@LurchNZ agree to a degree. I really liked lucid hybrid sli/crossfire. That was an interesting premise but sadly it never took off 😭

[@auturgicflosculator2183]

X850 XT is still seared into my memory as the only card that ever exceeded my expectations(to be fair, I was young and dumb, buying a $2.5k pc when I made $8/hour, so it was probably just my poor-man's perspective, heh)...but 3dfx were legends~🧡

[@LurchNZ]

@@eTeknix I remember that being about, and hoped it would take off but yeah. As you mentioned it was complicated. Voodoo had more of an impact on me for not just the SLI but for other reasons. Like a certain game called Unreal :D

[@laalki80]

I had 6850 and looked for another. Thank glob I didn't find one, I don't know if my PSU could've had it.

[@imaginalex5850]

hardware has become very boring.

[@johnpaulbacon8320]

AMD and ATI werer seperate companies before AMD aquired ATI. If AMD had aquired Nvidia instead of ATI the current situation would be completely different. Using multipe cards together has always been an option to the high cost of an absolute best performing single card. Maybe we have come Full - Circle and back to the point of using 2 x mid-tier cards vs 1 Ultra High end card.

[@zookajoetech]

While GPU's now what I would define as "way too fucking much", it would be nice to see multi-GPU come back. There's something completely wrong with having a nice big case and a eATX motherboard.. only for there to just be a single GPU. I used to run SLI 560 Ti's and R9 380's back then, and while not every game made good use of it, the ones that did (Overwatch was a surprisingly example), I was blown away by the performance. Would be cool to see.

[@DelticEngine]

Back in the day I purchased an AMD Radeon HD 3870X2, which was fantastic and somehow seemed to accelerate everything. I ran it for years, until a fresh driver install somehow caused the blower fan not to spin up properly which overheated and burned out one of the GPUs. I have still kept hold of the failed card as a memento... RIP my 3870X2, much loved and never forgotten. Although Crossfire faded away, it was replaced by MultiGPU which has always been supported and uses the PCIe bus. Given the speed and technology the PCIe used today, there is far more bandwidth than ever before for running multiple GPUs in one system. The difficulty now is finding motherboards and cases that will support multiple GPUs in terms of the number of suitable PCIe slots and suitable positioning on the motherboard as well as cases with enough expansion slot openings or support for risers. Maybe something like a small mining chassis or custom-built case would be a suitable platform and provide enough cooling potential for a MultiGPU setup. Having multiple GPUs installed also means that you can have them performing different tasks. For example, one GPU could be rendering video while the other is used for regular computing tasks. Maybe this flexibility could be useful for streaming where a second GPU, which in this case could be lower powered than the primary GPU, was used to encode the stream without needing a second PC or reducing the overall performance of a single system, which would save the expense and ongoing running costs of a second machine.

[@dwgould2001]

Latst time I ran a rig in Sli, It was with two rtx 670s. I think it was the doom reboot, where Nvidea dropped Sli and moved over to asynchronous compute model, I noticed that PhysX had been offloaded to the second card, and the main game was running off my first card. Difference being under Sli I was getting 140 - 180 FPS under Vulkan, once they dropped SLI, it tanked my frame rates to around 80 -90 fps. What you said about the multi gpu is fine in theory, been my expierence and my opinion that companies have made it difficult to implement. As an example Intel had a pretty good hardware h.264 encoder accessed via quick synch, but at the time you could access it through a programme called Lucid Virtu and your display out was hooked up to the main mother board display port. So no using my video cards , Any way with he prices the way they're are now who can afford multiple top tier cards these days? not me.

[@DelticEngine]

@@dwgould2001 The big problems with nVidia is that is has always relied on an SLI link adapter and specific drive support, whereas AMD evolved away from a special link adapter to the PCIe bus and maintained driver support as MultiGPU. The Vulkan API is designed to be able to use every part of your system to achieve maximum performance. The combination of MultiGPU and Vulkan, in theory, should give a decent performance increase. Putting all this together and I am wondering about two (or more) lower-end GPUs combined to give performance greater than a single high-end GPU and at a lower price point. Based on my own passed experience, I think it is also reasonable to suggest that such a combination could give decent performance for a number of years before an upgrade becomes necessary. Also, from what I remember, the second GPU shuts down when it is not being used resulting in a power saving. This could result in a system that is more efficient for light duties but has the power for heavy lifting when needed.

[@PREDATEURLT]

Last thing we need is game developers targeting Quad SLI 4090 for 60FPS...

[@kevinerbs2778]

They don't even do that with games for a single gpu the just wait till they can add D.L.S.S to be 60fps 4k now.

[@PREDATEURLT]

@@kevinerbs2778 They starting to use frame gen as requirement to target 60FPS already...

[@southbronxny5727]

I disagree. The new tomb raider series works perfectly in sli. That means that the sli was implemented thru the games' engine. Either the programmers were too lazy, incompetent or prohibited to incorporate into there engines. Nvidia especially could've prohibited it because it would them force them to add the sli connectors to the cards, which means more cost. My 3x 1080ti sli setup worked flawlessly in TR, Dying light, witcher 3 and many others. I was getting 3090ti frames in 2017.

[@TheSpiral01]

At these prices, i think most would just stay with one card. Cards were cheaper when SLI was a thing.

[@kevinerbs2778]

Getting rid of mutli-gpu is the reason for these prices

[@SaschaRobitzki]

Most, but there are plenty of people with more than two Nvidia GPUs in their machines these days.

[@TheSpiral01]

@@SaschaRobitzki Are you referring to users still using older cards in SLI?

[@SaschaRobitzki]

@@TheSpiral01 No, I mean people using two or more RTX 4090 and other cards.

[@TheSpiral01]

@@SaschaRobitzki Perhaps 'im ignorant to this which is possible, are you saying two 4090's in SLI today? Cause anything else would be beyond my knowledge. And if it is SLI, that's WILD!

[@highwayvigilante]

8800gt SLI chads report in

[@iikatinggangsengii2471]

i tried sli 4060ti 16gb for some reason lol, maybe just prototype on whats to come

[@alteito]

​@@iikatinggangsengii2471The 4000 series doesn't support SLI.

[@hypersonicmonkeybrains3418]

I want physics to make a comeback.. forget raytracing.

[@jordanwright5795]

I imagine this channel is geared more towards gamers ( I like to game too ) but we never stopped using multi-GPU systems in the 3D / VFX industry as GPU rendering has replaced CPU rendering for small to medium sized projects ( mostly TV / motion graphics for advertising etc ). Current workstation has two 4090’s and my prior had 4x 3090s. Production renderers like Redshift, Octane, Arnold GPU, Karma etc use CUDA/RTX cores for compute / rendering across multiple GPUs in a system without needing SLI to link the cards together. It’s made it possible for smaller studios like my own to compete with big shops that have access to huge render farms.

[@A2theC]

I'm glad you specified, as I thought I missed the point of the video when reading your comment 😅

[@radeksparowski7174]

yeah, a nvidia, amd and intel video cards met on one motherboard starts like a joke, but I used to mix different video cards for multimonitor support and somehow it worked fine, combining technologies so the endresult is the best you can get is not a bad aproach...if you have the time and nerves to finetune it for all the applications and games individually.....

[@DirEnGay]

I massively overspent on a diminishing returns SLI GTX 1080 machine back in 2016 pretty much right when SLI stopped becoming a thing for games. I'm due a new PC desparately now, was thinking about an RTX 5080 or 5090 depending on price but I hadn't even though about SLI ever becoming a thing again.

[@peenutsdad]

I did the same but had the gtx 980`s in sli and right after the 1080 came out and 1 of those killed the performance of both of my 980`s!

[@thatAKredneck]

With Pcie5 lanes increasing, would multiple gpu systems make sense again if you were using a motherboard and cpu that supported 36 lanes. This would leave 32 dedicated gpu off 2 x16 slots and 4 for the hard drive etc

[@jtjames79]

I'm using two computers to play. Skyrim. And I still need more video cards. Running Skyrim on one box, running multiple LLMs on another.

[@erictayet]

Ah! I had the ATI Rage Fury Maxx and when I bought the Intel Core i4790, I made sure to buy a CrossFire ready motherboard but ultimately the performance gain was too small to bother, and the newer GPUs have new feature sets like DX11 support anyway. So for GPUs, upgrading to new generation makes more sense. I did end up with 2 GPUs in the system, even when I upgraded to an AMD Ryzen 5900X, but it was mainly for part time ETH mining. Now that GPU mining is not profitable, I will continue to buy multi-GPU motherboards to be able to offload AI workloads across multiple GPUs. AI needs RAM more than anything!

[@jamegumb7298]

Hoping Intel releases low and mid range Battlemage with ridiculous ram for the tier. Could make it a bangr.

[@erictayet]

@@jamegumb7298 I agree, the Intel XMX engine on the Alchemist & Battlemage is potent. There is just one problem. While exploring Ollama, ComfyUI and other AI tools, I see nVidia CUDA and AMD ROCm. So far, I haven't seen dedicated Intel optimisation which means, Intel GPUs will run significantly slower than the other 2 because it has to run the generic DirectML codepath provided by DirectX. Documentation by the tool creators suggested that DirectML is slower than CUDA & ROCm. IDK about Intel GPU personally, I struggled getting my 7900XTX to run ROCm in WSL Ubuntu.

[@rossmclaughlin7158]

I remember having a 7970 in crossfire and it was amazing 💯 yes in some games flat out didn't work but when it did omg 😳

[@sabishiihito]

Blame devs for not putting proper support in games for it.

[@Persn-kun]

Cossfire and SLI were a good concept on paper, but the issue was a game needed a supporting profile for it and even then adding a new card didn't mean getting a 100% performance uplift. However, if both AMD and Nvidia get the MCM design to work perfectly I can actually see it making a comeback.

[@arenzricodexd4409]

to make MCM work probably a lot more harder than the old way of doing SLI/CF.

[@Lemmiwinks_The_Gerbil_King]

there were games that had a 90% efficiency and literally no stutter and that was with HB Sli.. at this time we have NVlink, which is a magnitude faster then SLI and also stacks the Vram as far as i know the only ditched it, because it hurt their business they dont want us to buy used cards to upgrade to a cheap SLI system they want us to buy new cards.

[@kevinerbs2778]

It never has gained 100% even going from single core to dual core cpus didn't magically get 100% scaling everyone has to stop thinking that it does.

[@BodySculptTV]

I operated a 1080Ti SLI setup for many years and witnessed its capabilities. It's my belief that Nvidia discontinued SLI to prevent competition with their 20 and 30 series cards. A 1080Ti SLI could rival a 3080, which wasn't profitable for Nvidia, leading to its phase-out. Regarding the future of multi-card setups, I foresee their use primarily for AI in gaming, such as NPC behavior, rather than rendering. This will remain the case unless Windows develops a DirectX version that aggregates all AI-capable cores. Should this happen, the 50 series may become the last traditional video card, with AMD and Intel processors' built-in video processors handling 1080P rasterization. AMD and Nvidia would then focus on selling AI cards that would stack, providing all necessary AI features (FSR, DLSS, XeSS) for upscaling and game AI inference.

[@arenzricodexd4409]

I don't think that's the reason why SLI support being taken out from gaming card. The primary plot of multi gpu is to convince a single user to buy more than one gpu. But to convince people into buying it they also must see the value of owning such card. For example your 1080Ti in SLI can rival 3080 performance is one of the intended effect to convince people to go SLI. Will that affect 3080 sales? Maybe but this is where things PhysX, multi monitor gaming or Ray Tracing should coming into play. For example even if your 1080Ti is as fast as 3080 using PhysX or RT or play your game in multi monitor will still going to cripple performance. So now you will want to have 3080 in SLI to tackle the performance problem. But SLI becoming harder to do when game engine keep adopting tech that did not work well with tech used in multi gpu. Plus as revealed by ex nvidia engineer maintaining and solving SLI related issue take a lot of driver team effort. Almost 50% of nvidia driver team effort are being dedicated to SLI despite very small userbase.

[@kevinerbs2778]

​@@arenzricodexd4409RT is way overated by everyone out of the 425 dx games is below 50% (220) of them have some yype of rt. Lwt alone fill blown RT support even lower. Same with pathtracing is a nich of niche of niche well below 0.1% of dx12/Vulkan games.

[@benybenshlomo7455]

THNK YOU

[@jbountalas]

Back in the day, I ran two Radeon 4890 cards in crossfire mode. It was awesome at the time, not twice as good, but close. I think the real excitement was to be able to flex about the dual high end cards and the power they drew. I remember running that setup on an original Pentium D, the first dual ore Pentium CPU. it was all about air cooling with large fans in copper toroids that weighed 2 pounds. It was glorious geekery taken to extremes. Now even with a 3080, graphics performance is out of the park, leaving crossfire or SLI in the dust gaming wise. Nevertheless, it was a great time to be a nerd.

[@PaulRoneClarke]

The original SLI “Scan line interleave” with 2 Voodoo cards. I had that back in 1998.

[@wh3resmycar]

Multi GPU configs was supposed to be standardized when DX12 came out.

[@therodenthitman]

I bought a custom loop watercooled (used) build in 2014 it had a 2600k and a 7990 and for a while I actually ran an additional 7970 so 3 way crossfire. I'm actually still using the majority of the same now but new mobo, CPU and GPU of course but still using the original reservoir, CPU waterblock, and radiators they're huge XSPC thick boys. In a Corsair 700D (I think, its mega)

[@IcaniCorrono]

The sad part is that nowdays as mentioned in the video it is possible to run even different GPU architectures and brand; if a serius effort was taken in this direction it will redecue a lot the e-waste. I mean - if properly supported - you can upgrade from let's say a 2080 to a 7900xt not swapping but adding performance, does not matter if it is not linear, you could just allow to last longer the hardware.

[@oswaldjh]

Back when this was the thing to do I watched from the sidelines and marveled at the performance and the price to accomplish this feat. Should it come back I'm ready with my unused Cross Fire Bridge.

[@abesmissioncontrol2013]

Closest I ever had to a dual-gpu setup was Crossfiring my HD6670 with my A10-6800k APU. The 6670 was faster on its own in most games, and in the few where it wasn't, the frame-times were a lot better solo. Bioshock Infinite was the only game I tried that was genuinely better with that (niche) Crossfire setup.

[@kevinerbs2778]

That cpu was too slow, for that.

[@maxkrug2000]

Yeah I remember having 2x HD6870 for rendering and one GT240 for PhysX in the same system.

[@AvroBellow]

I really hope they do come back because I ran Crossfire with HD 4870s, HD 7970s and even a bit with R9 Furies. It was great!

[@PaulRoneClarke]

Also for AI, multi GPU motherboards are definitely a thing. Mostly for the extra VRAM

[@husseinjuma5997]

My first ever multi GPU system was based on two 4870X2. Yes 4 GPUs !!!

[@shryko]

I used to have a cross fire setup... now I am thinking of going multi-GPU to split monitors, and to better allow streaming (ie. have 1 run the game, 1 run the stream)... but there's enough complexity that windows really works to hide from users around this. :(

[@FlyTimeRC]

I think that would actually be pretty cool.

[@100Bucks]

There's no point in doing this anymore when frame generation fixed this issue. All you need is a high refresh rate monitor and a program called "Losses Scaling". High refresh rate +Losses Scaling = Crazy FPS

[@InekoBK]

I think SLI will return but in a different way. Not with dual cards but multiple chips using interconnects like how Ryzen processors work, maybe even with different specialized cores for different functions like raytracing or machine learning and to save power by shutting down chips when it's functions aren't required for the tasks it runs at that time.

[@666Maeglin]

The only SLI setup I ever had was a 3dfx voodoo 2 setup. from 1998 to 2001.

[@davidgray8863]

Frame generation has replaced the need for multi gpu's... plus the latest mobos are £/$/€ 300 - 500 so how much more for a muli gpu board?.../ add in a cpu, psu, ram, case and SSD's and you're at 1500+ without adding multiple £/$/€1000 gpu's with all the associated issues for limited benefits... I doubt 2 rtx 4070's would out perform a 4090 but would cost the same... The only additional slot I'd like to see is for a dedicated ray tracing card so Nvidia would release gtx cards 20% cheaper than RTX and I wouldn't have to pay for the RT that I do not use 🙂

[@Sn00pzor]

I had 2 GTX 680 When they where top of the line it costed me adjusted for inflation 1030 USD(760 USD 2012). And this is Sweden we have ridiculous prices on electronic for example PS5 pro is 983 usd without disc drive or stand. Now in Sweden a RTX 4090 is around 2150 USD

[@julianfiacconi709]

In consumer PC's it would be nice to see SLI make a return. Remember NVLink is alive and kicking, pretty much desired in Machine Learning and AI computations. Probably wont happen unless game developers can leverage the power of multi GPU in their new games. It really is up to the Gaming Industry developers.

[@kevinerbs2778]

You pc gamers shpuld be compaining to developers that even a single rtx 4090 cannot run games at 4k 60fps without d l.s s crap.

[@James-l5s7k]

With space marine 2, I can understand. It feels like it need an array of4090s to run at 165 fps 4k native.

[@SaschaRobitzki]

"Multi-GPUs" were never gone. The most demanding applications that benefit from more than one GPU in the system do not need SLI/Crossfire to make use of multiple GPUs.

[@FroggyTWrite]

good video, but the part in your title was a 30 second afterthought which was disappointing

[@rubenloza1920]

could you imagine power needs and heat generation if a modern system with 2 let along 3-4 4090s cranking.. jeez..

[@crazyelf1]

Unless the problems like multi-stuttering and game support are addressed, this won't be coming back. One possibility is that chiplets in GPUs (if they get past the latency issues) can make huge dies that will allow comparable performance without these issues.

[@kevinerbs2778]

Stuttering is still happening in games whilw using sibgle cards his complaings about micro stutter is complegemmtely ignoing the game engine problem. Also hes wrong about amd All of RDNA support mGPU thats why they stopped cfossfire support.

[@wasdwasdwwasd]

7:38 that clip could well have been AC Unity being weird

[@psyckosama4614]

Had a 280X Crossfire rig back in the day

[@fleurdewin7958]

Motherboard manufacturers need to pay Nvidia licensing fees for SLI feature. These companies will want to avoid paying Nvidia ,at least I have not seen any AM5 motherboards that support SLI .

[@davidmccarthy6390]

I predict a comeback of sorts for multi GPU configurations. With the advent of "chiplets", there will be an incentive to put more than 1 chiplet on a card. 2, or even 4 chiplets on a single card could effectively make it a 2 or 4 GPU card. NVidia is the last of the developers to stay with monolithic designs, and the lower yields they get from that approach. Once they move to a chiplet/tile based architecture it could get very interesting, and funnily enough it may drive the cost down for consumer GPU's.

[@arenzricodexd4409]

MCM can increase yield but it does not necessarily make things cheaper. The advance packaging needed for MCM will make it more expensive than monolithic chip. AMD already run into this issue with RX7800 XT.

[@davidmccarthy6390]

@@arenzricodexd4409 That is true, but actual competition (I'm including Intel in this) does drive down prices, and that is where I see this going heading forward. NVidia's model is unsustainable in an economy such as this, where disposable cash has plummeted. If you have noticed, NVidia no longer sell what we would call "entry level" produccts anymore, so there is an opening in the market that is just screaming out to be exploited. Let's see where it all takes us, I remain hopeful. And maybe the whole lacndscape could change with Strix Halo APU's? It's gonna be fun to see who can get me to open my wallet. lol

[@davidmccarthy6390]

@@arenzricodexd4409 Issues such as this are solved, then refined, at which point the cost benefits swing the other way. MCM is the way oif the future, and as interconnects are improved they become more viable and cheaper at the same time. There will come a point very soon that the beneifts of a monlithic die are outwieghed by the negatives, and when yield percentages can determine viability, the move to MCM's is justified, and in time will become mainstream. Well in theory anyway.

[@arenzricodexd4409]

@@davidmccarthy6390 before MCM can become mainstream gpu maker still need work on how to make those GCD work like a single gpu die first. This is first and foremost still the biggest hurdle with MCM type gpu. Even CPU have issues on the CCD thing.

[@kevinerbs2778]

High clock speeds reduce latency between transfer of card to card with extrental or pci-x links.

[@jipillow1]

I had sli gtx 770's. Replaced them with a 1080. Cost about the same.

[@train3616]

Yay! Never caught one of the videos this early on.

[@eTeknix]

W00t. Get a notification for it?

[@train3616]

​@@eTeknix sure did.

[@eTeknix]

@ good to know that KZbin does work from time to time 😂 unless people do the bell icon, our content gets missed.

[@train3616]

@eTeknix it does from time. I was browsing the store and watching. I can get your products in the states correct?

[@someoneoutthere1866]

Disagree, it wasn't complicated to setup crossfire or sli.. I still have a crossfire setup on a PC that I have in my theater room connected to a projector for running a golf simulator

[@mohamad.h4300]

Incredible content my man

[@laalki80]

Wasn't there as well that it was increasingly difficult to design games to afford for this, or was it just left for GPU companies?

[@laalki80]

I had one HD 6850 and looked for another, can't even remember what my PSU was.

[@NeoDon1]

Not really anymore do to $$$. Gone are the days of VOODOO SLI! Im lucky to have a 4080 Super

[@jipillow1]

Cheese n rice, it hurt just to buy one gpu

[@ambientlightofdarknesss4245]

2030 game requirements: Minimum = 2x RTX 7050 (720p 30fps with DLSS ultra performance and framegen) Recommended = 4x RTX 7090 ( 1080p 60fps with DLSS ultra performance with framegen)

[@kevinerbs2778]

These hybird Rasterization raytracing cards won't last that long. Expect they won't do that anyways, because single card code is means less work.

[@iikatinggangsengii2471]

3090 can be sli'd amd crossfire stopped from like long time ago, which was a shame since it doesnt require sli bridge and certified motherboard unlike nvidia crossfire x only requires pcie slots before amd stopped supporting it, prob due to lack of human resource

[@billbeis7691]

Do you think we crap money?

[@sinnermac6338]

I loved my 8800GTX SLI 'd

[@A2theC]

We're at the point we need a super computer the manage the lack of optimization UE5 has... nearly all UE4 games run great on even older hardware. Everything since has turned our system performance to dog shite, mysterious bottleneck on top tier systems even with raytracing turned off we need to use DLSS/FG to get great fps but the frame time graph still shows hitches and drastic changes in pacing. This really needs to change, the GPU isn't even fully utilized, neither are the CPU cores. It's almost like emulating PS3 CELL games is easier than running a game on it's target platform.

[@antondovydaitis2261]

Algorithm Appeasing Alliteration!

[@edinpandzic5838]

oh yeah...multiple 5090 cards....its like a down payment on a house

[@BenState]

an american house may be

[@volkov956]

SLI and Crossfire needed to work without software knowing it was there especially with 1 card having dual gpu's but neither seemed interesting to do it. Aka card manages the multiple gpus internally and windows/linux just see it as 1 gpu

[@kevinerbs2778]

mGPU can already do this.

[@Tentacl]

At MSRP USD 2000 for a 4090? I guess if you are mining bitcoin or something....

[@Mr11ESSE111]

Nvidia and AMD dont want SLI because their expensive gpus will have bad sale !!who will buy overpriced 4090 or 5090 when it comes when you could get two 4070super and get same or better performance for lower price

[@iikatinggangsengii2471]

its smth abt how they create cpus, they can but only on expensive boards, which not what sli crossfirex meant to be

[@iikatinggangsengii2471]

example on radeon hd days you can crossfire on 80$ board, good upgrade option

[@SaschaRobitzki]

There are plenty of people with two or more 4070 Super or other cards in one system with full Nvidia support. There's no SLI needed to utilize them.

[@patrickjoseph3412]

had gtx 480s in sli ... Crysis still won

[@onknight]

Back in the day ATI was a Canadian company that was later bought by AMD. ATI was an amazing company for its time

[@auturgicflosculator2183]

They were quick to rise. Buying ArtX and Tseng Labs didn't hurt their engineering base any~

[@AvroBellow]

My first video card was an ATi EGA Wonder back in 1988.

[@BenState]

they got smashed by nvidia and nearly went out of business due to underwhelming products and terrible driver support. thats why they were sold.

[@auturgicflosculator2183]

@@BenState Driver issues were an acknowledged problem for ATI in the late 1990s and early 2000s, though ATI began to improve significantly in the early 2000s with the release of the Radeon series. However, ATI was not in imminent danger of going out of business before AMD acquired it. AMD paid a premium for ATI, which was trading at around $16 per share before the announcement. AMD’s offer valued ATI at $21 per share, a 30% premium over ATI’s market value at the time, reflecting AMD’s strategic desire to diversify into the GPU market and align with ATI’s technology, particularly for integrated graphics in CPUs to compete with Intel graphics. AMD, not ATI, were the ones struggling at this point. The $5.4 billion acquisition strained AMD's resources, and the financial crisis in 2008 almost brought them to their knees. They eventually rebounded. ATI was never in danger of closing due to competition.

[@betag24cn]

with these prices? no.

[@shannonrhoads7099]

Who can afford multiple GPUs these days? 🤣

[@cybercapri]

You completely missed the mark, GREED is what killed SLI. GPU Monopiles, if you have to ask who are the Monopolies then clearly you're the problem, were not selling enough GPUs because folks were extending the life of the older GPUs by adding more. GPU Monopolies hit up the Game Devs to not support SLI in their Games and soon after it didn't make a difference if you had SLI or not. Fast forward to current days, early Nov 2024, and GPU Monopiles are now trying to shove multiple GPUs on a single board down our throats at 1,000% profit and making it seem like they were on board with SLI the entire time. GREED killed SLI, not what you've suggested here. Higher GPU Prices are a direct result of Monopiles hell bent on GREED, nothing else. If the PC Market had Free Competition, or Capitalism, involved with it GPUs would cost 500 USD for 4090 Ti Super not an Arm and half your Leg the way it is now. You all fail to take into consideration Profit margin when you factor in the cost of anything. Nvidia is easily @56% Profit so, for example, a 1,000 USD GPU has 560 USD Profit which means that same GPU could sell for 440 USD and still maintain a reasonable profit. You all need to stop buying ANYTHING and let the next several releases of AMD, Intel, and Nvidia twist in the wind and watch how quickly prices drop. Seriously stop buying EVERYTHING until pricing drops to something reasonable. Let them paper release anything and don't BUY, watch how fast the price drops. Monopolies are killing the PC market and you all keep FEEDING THE GREED and you all need to STOP DOING THAT. GPUs are cheap, and the RTX 4090 Ti should only cost about 500 USD, maybe 600 at the most. An RTX 4060 should cost 60 USD Tops. They want use to upgrade every six months then they need to price it so we can afford to buy new every 6 months. The only Monopoly worse is Apple iCrap Stuff, at over 200% profit margin. That's right dolt, you buy one iCrap Phone and Apple replaces it with 5, that's absurd and you folks need to stop FEEDING THE GREED... Don't take my word, do your own research and Google Profit margins and see with your own eyes...

[@Agent_N7]

Someday, we may have to try it again... but not today

[@Raven-lg7td]

wow you really copied HU background

[@pooley3l33t]

At today's prices!/ don't be stupid 😂

[@nfsm654]

This could be rose tinted nostalgia glasses, but I have fond memories of a lot of people around me having great results with SLI/Crossfire. With results somewhere around 50-80% boost in performance or absolutely none (in games with no support). A few people were running two midrange cards for high end performance, others straight up running e-peen increasing halo tier cards together. Including one guy with a C2Q Extreme and 3x ATI 5870s on a 2560x1600 screen (circa 2010 ish). Although the triple crossfire fell apart more often than not in gaming.

[@pvdgucht]

GPU’s have massively outpaced CPU’s performance improvements. Together all new games being highly unoptimized we see a CPU bottleneck quite often with a 4090 and the 5090 wont make that better.

[@Eneeki]

This will be useful for 3D asset creation but I do not see it making much difference for games. I currently run dual 4090's in my Blender workstation so I can access much more vram, but both gpu's are not fully used while rendering bringing back SLI would make people in my industry very happy.

[@Steve30x]

I remember having two BFG graphics cards. I can't remember which generation they were but when I had them in SLI with the factory bios I was getting lots of graphics corruption and artifacting. I then flashed the bios from a different brand with all the same ram timings and GPU bios settings to them and SLi worked perfectly. I got onto BFG about it and they completely denied that there was a problem with their bios. I gave up with contacting bfg and I kept the bios from a different brand on the GPUs. The GPUs were still running perfectly on sli two years later when I sold them for an upgrade. I think BFG went out of business shortly after I sold the GPUs. It would be cool to see and and Nvidia doing multi GPU on one board again though. Or if they allowed others do multi GPU chip on one board.

[@spacedock873]

Back in the day I build a folding rig using 4 x GTX980's which cost nearly £2k just for the GPU's. Now a single top end card can cost that! With these prices, little support and diminishing returns I doubt that multi-GPU games machines will return. Having said that, with top end games struggling to push high frame rates in 4K/VR even on 4090's I do feel that there may be an argument for a multi-GPU solution.

[@baysidejr]

I'm jumping around the video so sorry if I missed it but don't forget about the Apple M2 Ultra in the Mac Studio. It takes two M2 Max I believe and connects them via the Ultra Fusion Interposer and that includes cpu and gpu. So not quite SLI/Crossfire because that has to go over the slow pci bus and talk to the cpu i believe but the apple way is way better and maybe with large APUs like the upcoming AMD Strix Halo 40CU chip maybe we get this on the PC side of things too. Intel's Pat Gelsinger had a quote recently about discrete gpus like battlemage/celestial may not be needed because of large APUs/SOCs. I took that to mean they might get in on this MAC studio esque large SOC CPU/GPU but I'm guessing based on wishful thinking. APPLE MAC Notes: Industry-Leading UltraFusion Technology M2 Ultra is built from two M2 Max dies connected through UltraFusion, Apple’s industry-leading, custom-built packaging technology. UltraFusion uses a silicon interposer that connects the dies with more than 10,000 signals, providing over 2.5TB/s of low-latency interprocessor bandwidth. UltraFusion’s architecture enables M2 Ultra to appear as a single chip to software. This means code doesn’t need to be rewritten to utilize the extreme performance of M2 Ultra and makes UltraFusion unlike anything else in the industry.

[@Ivan-pr7ku]

Frame generation pretty much replaced the multi-GPU concept of producing more frames. The extra input lag and the occasional picture artifacts are minuscule concessions against all the troubles setting up SLI/Crossfire system -- compatible mobo, more powerful PSU, better airflow case and the endless anxiety around game patches and driver profile updates. At some point, in the late 2000s, multi-GPU was thought as an alternative solution to the big high-end GPUs, where you can pair two mid-range cards and pretty much get the same performance, but that never held any promise. The advance of deferred rendering game engines with complex frame buffer composition threw a big wrench in the AFR method of distributing the work between GPUs. Less and less game studios justified the extra effort for a marginal market segment anyways.

[@kevinerbs2778]

Frame geberation cannot match dual gpu in speed. He also skipped the fact there have been multiple triple A reeleases that had micro stutters problems without uaing multiple gpus. The power co.plaints is bull crap too i have rtx 2080 tis and a I can match a rtx 4080 i. Deus ex mankind divided. barely uses more watts tha. It too like 50 watts. Driver support is still heavily needed for dx12 even more so than dx11 was. Looks at Intel Arc gpu and drivers You know how I know becuase I've tested it.

[@kyledurning]

I really hope not. Currently a graphics card costs about the same as an entire machine did. (when SLA was a thing.)

[@rangersmith4652]

What happened to it was it almost never worked right, and when it did, it didn't scale. I built a 2 x R9-290 system that gave me any where from zero to roughly 35% more FPS and tanked my frame time. Later, I built a custom water cooled 2 x 980Ti system that was even worse. I have used either since.

[@AvroBellow]

By the time the R9 290 came out, Crossfite and SLI were already almost dead.

[@rangersmith4652]

@@AvroBellow I suppose so. I have a pair of 5770s I'm going to try with a 4790K and then an FX-8350, just for grins.

[@AvroBellow]

@@rangersmith4652 I meant the games involved, not the hardware. I was able to use Crossfire with my R9 Furies in a couple of games (I think Far Cry 4 was the last one). You'd have to choose an old game that supported it. I can say for certain that the original Batman: Arkham Asylum DEFIINTELY supported it because it was the last game I played with my twin HD 4870s. I assure you that with a game of the correct era, you'll be shocked at how good Crossfire could be. Cheers!

[@rangersmith4652]

@@AvroBellow At that time I played FF14 ARR (released in 2013?) almost exclusively, and scaling was so-so. I got my pair of 5770s from a fellow player in trade for one of my R9-290s, mostly to help him out. The single 290 ran circles 5770s in XFire. I don't know what games I want to try.

[@AvroBellow]

@@rangersmith4652 Well, as I said, Batman Arkham Asylum works great and the game itself is amazing. You should try that.

[@Steve30x]

I had sli in a few computer generations. It was hit and miss with it. If Nvidia didn't add support you could try to force it to work in the games with mixed results. Plus even though you had double the ram sli only used the ram from one GPU and the ram in the other one was sitting idle and the second GPU was only being 50% - 80% utilised. Most of the time the second GPU was only 50% utilised. So sli was kind of a waste of money. Even though I wasted the money doing so for a small gain in FPS 😂.

[@xsatn2082]

I think in the future we'll have a separate gpu for ray tracing

[@britexitengineer1407]

Twice the cost, twice the heat & twice the power used & all for 40% gain at best.

[@TheKims82]

I remember getting close to 80% gain in Battlefield 3, but with all the microstutter it certainly wasn't worth it.

[@AvroBellow]

You're missing the point of it. The point of multi-GPU setups was that you could upgrade to greater performance for a lot less money by just buying another of the card you already had. By the time you did that, your card was worth half of its original price and you still got to leverage the power of the first card you already bought. You said it yourself, a 40% increase. That's a HUGE upgrade.

[@arenzricodexd4409]

Yes 40% gain is low but it is not the best. But back then many tittle can gain over 60% more performance with SLI.

[@AvroBellow]

@@arenzricodexd4409 I was just using that number randomly. I don't actually remember what the uplift was because it depended on the game. The fact is that I got a substantial uplift for the cost of a used card. It was a much better value than just buying a cutting-edge GPU. A 40% uplift is the difference between an RX 6600 and an RX 6700 XT. That's not small potatoes.

[@harveybirdmannequin]

Ray tracing the new SLI. Lots of gimmicks have come and gone.

[@arenzricodexd4409]

But RT will not going away like SLI.

[@kevinerbs2778]

​@@arenzricodexd4409yes it will, just try a HDR screen & good game for HDR like No Man's Sky.

[@jacobew2000]

Only reason why NVIDIA stopped doing this was because of lack of supply, and lack of them wanting to support it.

[@jebes909090]

4 5090s in sli 💀

[@meyatetana2973]

People can't even afford one GPU lol nobody will be buying 2 or 4 LOL Also when SLI came about no game supported it so hearing that argument from people just seems stupid

[@kevinerbs2778]

So i guess the 1,064 games that support it out the 5,985 dx9/dx10/dx11 games don't exist then huh? (Thats 18.5% bye the way)