To sum it all up 1. AI 2. The more you buy, the more you save

Lots of people were buying gtx 970s and getting great performance. Nvidia didn’t want others buying used gpus cheap and not buying newer cards.

The GTX 1060 never supported SLI. The GTX 1070 and up supported it.

former SLI user here. the thing that kill SLI is definitely the software. more specifically game engine. nvidia can improve SLI with things like NVlink but it is useless when game engine developer keep introducing tech that working against tech used in multi GPU like AFR. honestly i don't think nvidia remove SLI from consumer in favor of things like AI. after a decade of pushing multi GPU game developer have no interest to support multi GPU in their game engine (they do the opposite when it comes to CPU). the effort to support SLI in games is not cheap. ex nvidia engineer said in the past almost 50% of driver team work was to make sure SLI work in all existing games despite the amount of SLI user only account for small amount of nvidia user.

Actually, RDR2 was released in the fall of 2018, not 2017...

I had 2, HD 5850's to crossfire BATTLEFIELD 3 back in the day. What a time to be alive.

SLI truly died because of money... You said it "It was becoming more a budget option". They wanted people to get off the older GPUs and spend more money for the newer stuff. The longer they kept SLI alive, the longer people would want to stay on their older GPUs. I think AMD threw a wrench into their plans when they made FSR and Upscaling for everyone. hahaha

They do explain why. It's deferred rendering techniques that rely on the previous frame to render the next frame. With SLI the previous frames buffer is on the other card. Because the rendering technique used was AFR. This is how implicit multi gpu modes worked. The devs had the option of using explicit multi GPU modes, but only one or two games did. So Nvidia gave up on the feature.

If NVIDIA keeps on pulling these actually good features from their gpus AMD and Intel will be sure to catch up.

I miss SLI. I was running SLI in every setup I've had since the 8800gtx era.

Cutting the BS Nvidia wants you to buy high end GPU and not a old one that they won't profit off of.

I think SLI hurt their sales so thats why they ended it. You could buy 2 4080 Supers for what you could buy a 4090 for

Nvidia wants you to upgrade to every gen they have, that's why sli is dead

I worked at a Gamestop back in the day and the store manager had a triple SLI with 480's in his home PC. Same guy also owned both a neo geo AND a turbo grafx. Dude was my idol as a teenager lol. Those were the days!

How about being able to use a lesser card as a dedicated physx card? That was cool too.

I think AMD could do well if they market "Crossfire" with RDNA4...since they are mid-level cards anyway....AMD can market (RDNA4) 2x Radeon RX-9700XT for 2x $550 will get you better than RTX-5090 performance for $500 less. Then they can do the same with the Radeon RX-9600XT, and provide sell those cards (which have 7700XT class performance) for $299 each, and let you crossfire them later for RX-7900XTX+-Class performance.

3:45 imagine being this forum poster & seeing your comment from a decade ago in this video 😂

I always heard about it, but could never justify the cost to myself. Never got to experience it, sadly. Thanks for covering it.

Yung Gravy and Shania Twain just dropped a song about White Claw. 202wtf is going on.

Could you imagine 2 rtx 4090s working together?!

I remember strapping two 570s together, and then to my horror finding out what microstuttering was.

SLI evolved into THe Linking Chip that is now used in Cloud GPUs now 2 48 gb GPU are 96 GB VRAM and the high speed data transfer between the Servers

I remember seeing a video where a guy used crossfire with a custom driver to do combined graphics between an A series apu and a low end graphics card.

Years ago I ran a dual 980Ti SLI setup, and before that I ran a dual R9-290 Crossfire setup. Both added a ton of power draw and heat. Neither scaled worth a hoot in FFXIV, which was the only game I cared about. Still is, pretty much. Now that any decent mid-range GPU is more than enough for FFXIV, I have zero interest in dealing with the added complexity of a dual-GPU setup.

AI upscaling and frame generation makes more sense now

I had 2 780ti’s in SLI for years. I want to say till 2020. But like you said many new game I tried always had some issue with SLI. I ended up upgrading to a 5700XT then. 7900XT.

Honestly this is AMD and Intel's opportunity to implement a new and improved version of this software on their gpu's and actually push its use because they arent going blow for blow with NVIDIA in the single gpu market why not try and hit them in the multi gpu set up market especially with their more budget friendly cards.

You could set AFR for any "unsupported" game and get AT LEAST a ~50% uplift from having the second card.

Still useful for 3d rendering, 3090 is the last nvlink/multi gpu compatible sku though.

what you mean by "bought by an up and coming" ..... Nvidia was already an 800lb gorllia in the industry when the bought 3dfx. they were already on Geforce 2 and working on pushing out geforce 3 when they bought 3dfx. they already had a 80+% market share at that time ... they had already got "up". that said i think SLI died because Nvidia doesn't want consumers to spend just $300-400 bucks per card (600-800$ total) and be able to beat out a 2000 dollar card doing so. they don't want you to be able to do that and even come in just under the $2000dollars they want you to buy the $2000 dollar card or the single card that come under it at $1000-1200 dollars. thbat's why SLI died and why they won't be bringing it back. it was only getting better and they sure as shit didn't want some one to pass up buying the $1500 3090 and just get 2 3070's for 500 bucks less.

Frame Generation tech pretty much supplanted SLI (and CrossFire) functionality -- it produces more frames with the same or worse input lag, plus few image artifacts for a change, but at the low cost of one GPU in the system. Multi-GPU is still an option in DX12 and other APIs, but now it's all up to the game developers to implement and use it.

No need to roast my first ever game like that😢 3:41

So can i use sli on mw3 2023?

Amd and nvidia should have just made a driver special for multi gpu use. Making all gpus in the setup into 1 virtual gpu so games can treat it that way and the driver splits the workload between the gpus😮‍💨

Shame about SLI, I used to be a top tier card like a 80 series then after a few years when it was showing its age I’d buy another one second hand and be back on top again

As a 3D artist, I have a different perspective. This was forced to make 3D render farms and small 3D studio's buy the A6000 Ada's at ridiculous cost if you needed the extra Vram. 2017 was right about the time 3D art because mainstream and financially viable for smaller studio's and artists. My perspective comes from a conversation with a sales rep when I was looking into buying a6000's for my blender workstation. I think SLI for games was an afterthought and the real focus was 3D render farms and special effect studios.

3dfx did not fail from decline. It was doing insanely well when it failed and was the top end. What happened is they took on to much at once and went bankrupt. They tried to make their own cards from start to finish cutting out the board partners and had to deal with the costs that goes with doing that, instead of just selling their chips to the board partners and having them deal with pcb costs packaging and logistics when they weren't ready for it. Even today NVIDIA and AMD only do limited amounts compared to their board partners.

It's easy blame devs when YOUR documentation SUCKs. "Kill" the tec is just a excuse to force people to go high end. Think I am wrong? Now we got: - PCI E GEN 5 (crossfire needed gen3 x4 without any bridge) -M$oft Direct Acess Memory for the card decompress textures and from the storage device without passing by the CPU - HAGS (Hardware accelerated graphcs scheduling) -Resible Bar (read/access more then 256mb)

I remember the voodoo cards, and yes I would dream of SLI even upto 20 series. Some game ran slower with it enabled

nvlink is still going on in the server space . it basically doubles vram and turns two gpus into 1

my first gaming pc was an intel 2600k and 2 gtx 660ti in SLI

😭 SLi (and crossfire) was amazing. Sadly my 3090s are the last SLi rig, for now 😭 and it's not even compatible with DX11 games. For that, I still have my dual 2080Ti system

Now more than ever we need SLI/Crossfire. Or something that could help with ray tracing, especially when it comes to AMD GPU.

this video is criminally underrated

I built my last SLI rig back in 2012 using two GTX 660 Ti's and it was awesome until mid-2014 when titles like Watch Dogs, Wolfenstein: TNO and the Evil Within started releasing with non-existent or broken SLI support. Things didn't improve that following year with games like Assassins Creed: Unity and Batman: Arkham Knight both forcing me to physically remove my second card from the system because simply disabling SLI wasn't cutting it. Things haven't gotten much better until GTA V surprisingly launched with excellent SLI support and my 660 Ti's were useful for another 6 month's until I eventually switched to a GTX 980 Ti.

I had (2) Vodoo 2 12MB cards and a Fusion AGP. That erra was fun!

my first SLI setup was with 2 1080 ti's on an x99 platform. man the good ole days

Friend of mine, had 2x GTX 980's...year later i purchased the GTX 1080 and showed him the gpu performance. He was shocked. I never forget his face lol

SLI started in the 3dfx video accelerator cards.

I had 2 hd 7970 and move/ upgrade to the 980 was rather lackluster at the time given what 4 or 5 years I had between upgrading to be noticing that games largely played similarly to the way they did is a bit of a disappointment to say the least that's like some one today building a pc to highest spec they can afford and upgrading to second highest end GPU available in 2029 to see little to no improvement but this honestly happened.

running mismatched cards in one system with different screens plugged into each has kind of become the more common multi-GPU system setup. That way you can offload lower priority tasks to a weaker GPU and keep your stronger one dedicated to the game. And I think this became common enough that people just didn’t care for SLI

Any time a company kills something good, it's all about the money. Either they don't want something cutting into their profits, or they have something else that will bring in more dough.😮

I looked into this pre pandemic. What i found is the leed engineer kept getting into it with tge CEO. Thr msi. Sticking point is Nvidia wanted to start charging a LOT more for a single card. And sli somehow wasn't going to let them because people could just buy older cards and not buy new ones. And they couldn't produce enough. So, they fired him. And with the 20 series, prices took a huge jump and the started phrasing them out.

I ran two Nvidia 660's. Saved me from having to spend big bucks on a new card. At the time most card makers included the SLI bridge with their cards if it was capable. Then one 660 blew up and I finally upgraded to a 1070.

Driver-based multi-GPU is highly possible without the troubles of AFR. Nvidia wanted multi-GPU to die because they had a point where a pair of RTX xx70 cards would match the RTX xx90 card at 60% of the price. Not anymore, especially with the RTX 40 series pricing. All of the glitches and stutter were a part of how AFR worked. AFR gave the marketable results, but Screen Splitting methods resolved the AFR problems. Screen Splitting methods had trouble with load balancing, but there are methods around it, if people would put the effort to build them.

I ran 2 Kepler era (gtx7xx I think) Titan X in sli to run games at 4k and they struggled. That cheap 4k monitor wasn't that cheap after all lol.

its criminal that the moment they started charging 80 dollars for an nvlink bridge and made sli bridges unusable is the same time they stopped supporting sli. i bought 2 x 2080ti and the80 dollar bridge only to find out the setup was useless

NVLink wasn't introduced to the consumer cards until the 20 series, not sure why you said 10 series & NVLink on the consumer side was basically SLI it didnt operate like the workstation version and pool resources

sli is grate , i buy a 970 when the 10 seri came out , for 200euro , and second one few years after for 100 , run them in sli , and still have them today , work just fine ,

Thank you for posting this video 🎥🍿🍺🇺🇸. You have a new subscriber 🎉. Keep up the great 👍 work 🎉.

Another issue which LTT proved was that for all the performance benefits you got, it was really necessary when compared to single GPUs systems. Now that's to say that if this was done today it wouldn't be worth it but at the time it just was really needed

No matter now if only 1 is soo much expensive i cant affort it 😂

Just imagine dual or even triple 4090 builds combined as one

I just want to drop down here in the comments and say that I think this technology would be very useful in VR graphic handling. Wish it would be adopted.

Amd should bring back a better crossfire. Since they gonna focus more on budget and midrange cards and two midrange cards beating a top Nvidia card would be cool to see 😂

I had two Radeon 7970s and it only worked well in like 2 games lol.

nvlink was deprecated simply because amd gave up on crossfire first, for nvidia sli was just a checkbox to be ticked against the competitor - this has been something they would have liked to do earlier but were forced to keep up the charade

I had an APU and the dedicated gpu version in a "Hybrid crossfire" setup. Loved it. Had to sell the system because took too many years to have dx12 games and not many games were properly supported. Learned a lot back then about computers and drivers :V I've seen recently a Chinese guy who got Nvidia and AMD experiment and it was amazing, a 3070 and a 6600, or something like that

oh boy on old days my frend have 2x980ti this pc was monster

Wasnt DX12 supposed to offer sli features so it wasnt put on the devs to support it.

The last cards I used SLI with, was the 8800 GTX. Good times.

Nobody is getting to the real reason, which is economical. You see back then most people did not buy the top end graphics card, let alone two of them, there simply didn’t exist this economic class of people who could afford ultra high end graphics card, but there were a few outliers. So what you do is simply give them a shitty software that allows the use of two cards, so you can sell two cards to the whales. It just didn’t make economical sense to fab a huge GPU for the 1% PC gamers. Where as today, any forum or discord server has a bunch of guys with 4090, the gamer kids of the past are now working and have money to throw at GPUs, plus there’s a market for ultra high end professional graphics for AI and other compute, so now it makes economic sense to just take one of those huge compute cards you’re making anyway, and turn it into super high end gaming card. Technology is also a factor of course, most people don’t know SLI does not pool your VRAM, having two cards with 1GB each in SLI, you still have just 1GB, which was a big problem during the transition over to 4K,, there’s no point having so much GPU power when you are getting huge stutters because you don’t have enough VRAM to render the resolution you want. SLI also works very similarly to frame gen, it doubles your frame rate but it increases input delay, because you aren’t rendering frames faster, you’re rendering two frames on two cards. So today the only difference between SLI and frame gen, is the interlaced frames will be perfectly rendered instead of AI interpolated, good luck seeing the difference.

NVlink for 60 class cards would be something that they should consider. 500$ each for two cards plus the bridge and it wouldn't infringe on their high end "AI" systems. It won't be as powerful as a 80 or 90 class card but it will give gamers something that will be fun to play with.

Used to have a Radeon 4870X2 and later an HD5970. Both worked really well overall. There were some cases of microstuttering in certain games, but often I could just disable one of the GPUs or adjust some settings that would more or less resolve the issue. Overall I'm happy with what I got, although I realise a lot of people had tons of issues with these Crossfire cards.

Because DirectX 12 and 12a can do Multi-GPU without needing external API calls. But most games don't have Multi-GPU enabled, except "Ashes of the Singularity" and maybe a few other games. Yes you can still do Multi-GPU, but the game needs to be running either DirectX 12 or 12a or Vulkan with Multi-GPU support enabled in the game. If the game doesn't support it, well you're out of luck.

0:09 into the video, let me stop you there as SLI died because of: Money, and Greed first and only first, this dictated the turn of events that subdued and pretty much killed "SLI"... SLI options and or similar features to the common man posed a potential when GPU upgrades would normally be warranted, to have the PC Gamer (instead of buying a new shiny mid-tier $800 dollar GPU) have another option. What about doubling your V ram? Doing so would be also, half to a quarter the price of that shiny shiny new GPU if that is, the current one possessed by said GAMER cost about the equivalent of that new shiny shiny Nvidia wants to force or throw, maybe slam? Down our throats. SLI was this option for us mere mortals, that little connector (never used by most) that came with your GPU back in the day, allowed you to utilize SLI on compatible motherboards (most had this feature OR crossfire AMD). The subsequent move then by Nvidia was too, ice this feature, as only reserved for higher end cards first, then by, replace said feature with their "new improved" Nvidia Link. This also was an over-priced monstrosity of an item that now one would need to also acquire separately (in most cases). The plan now was moving this feature too only the highest end top tier consumer card (by that I mean 1 card only) available at the time being the RTX 3090. They, Nvidia, was already against the clock as AMD and Gen 5 PCIE was about to establish itself for the mainstream. Gen 3 and prior PCIE channels (where you slot in GPU) were in the past, not, fast enough to (basically) effectively use SLI feature AND the requirements for the SLI adapter or NV LINK adapter was needed that synced and made this feature possible (basic explanation). But with the cat out of the bag and Intel to soon follow, Gen 5 PCIE allows very easily, for, all current GPU's (including the 40 90 that needs max gen 4 lanes for full functionality) the necessary speed between GPUs to enable these linked states and subsequentially ALL that POWER for mere mortals to ponder and acquire, while Nvidia would be counting less mullah in turn going towards their wallets... Also, the narrative driven was that those (past titles) games ("not much support it anymore."...) did not develop and allowed for the SLI feature set (for whose actual benefit and influence I have you ponder?) to be utilized anymore... People? Please. So now after 0:09 seconds into this video I apologize for what I have transpired on all of you but with that said if you got this far into my comment then now kiddies you know the truth! Shamelessly after reflection of my own actions, consider going down a rabbit hole with us and check out my new tech channel, linked to my handle here (shamelessly of course!) @phantomtec while just another tech phantom myself, Peace. P.S I hope for the love of all things tech that "META PCs" did this truth justice and is not another one of those shills we at phantomtec call ironically "just phantom tech here" (you know? more BS...) no hard feelings...

I think you are a bit off on your time scale... actual usability of SLI, specifically game support was dying as of like late Keppler. Yeah, its true, there where a few cherry picked examples that thrived on SLI, but ive tried it on newer games that state they support it, and generally it does nothing, or even less than nothing... i love me some crysis as much as the next guy, but thats almost all it was good for, Crysis was the Cyberpunk of its day. I have a GTX 690 on hand right now, and even in games from its era it is very unwieldy

A correction here. . The GTX 10xx cards did not use NVlink, but High Bandwidth SLI. NVlink was a Quadro developed interface, and was also awailable on the RTX 2080 and 2080Ti GPUs. It is way better than SLI, because it can also link the memory, utilizing all the VRAM from both cards. It's sad that it has been taken away from mainstream, and never got real gaming support. But I'm sure Nvidia did not want 2x2080Ti (with 22GB) besting a 3090Ti, which it could with perfect scaling. :)

The problem with SLI for me was every time I considered adding a second card later to boost performance a new generation GPU came out that could do it with a single card.

i had dual 6800 ultras w/ my fx-55. quadish 4870x2's w an fx-60. it's nice to just run one card nowadays.

I had a few quad SLI workstations (mostly used for VM's and running the CUDA SDK in linux), i think the last was a 780 x4 build. Main issue with SLI was vary few games actually utilized it. No one wanted to waste development runway to optimize a game around it when it was a vary vary tiny section of the market share (except for those directly sponsored by NVDA to use it for marketing and even then was usually halfassed)

I remember having 2 gts 320s in sli years ago and one of the first core 2 duo cpu 😂 man how things have improved since then

i wonder if amd ryzen failed during launch will intel i9 exist now

I had a 3090 SLI set up, 600mil of Rad and it was still more heat than anything I ever imagined, 700w each, 1500w total power draw

the green gpu in the thumbnail looks like the monster logo

Vr and SLI had a cool option if devs utilised it, one gpu per eye basically, but lazy devs never used or did it correctly

I remember running dual 970's back in 2014.. and it was amazing if the the developers actually used it 🤷🏿‍♂️

Remember Guys You we're able to crossfire your APU with an GPU lol

Game dev kill support for it.......if a game does not use sli, it wasted money

Technically the vendors are already presenting new single chip designs that are in fact chiplets with cross chip communications to create monolithic GPU's. The problem is not bandwidth as this can be increased as needed. Forget about Micro-Stuttering, Latency etc... Backside Power Delivery is a technology process that free up even more space for connectivity and reduce costs & complexity, so the only issue holding back NVidia and AMD from offering SLI scaling is simply greed.

Imagine the power needed to run triple 4090, you'd need own power plant at home

I used to have sli systems but it's up to game devs to support it and the frame time spikes sucked big time , I think that's what killed it .

When it died I went ITX and never looked back. SLI was awesome though. The more you buy the more you save, maybe Nvidia would get you a deal now if you bought more GPUs....right....right?

The SLI worked flawlessly with 3DfX voodoo cards. But somewhere in the line, nVidia just opted to fuck it up... as every technology with potencial.

it did not, it was phased out of consumer products

Becouse you cant fit 2 graphics cards in the same case anymore ?

From my perspective: 1. The trend to make technology much smaller, compact yet powerful. Especially for general markets. People today build PC like less cable, smaller parts, less complicated, and also more lightweight materials. Thats why mini ITX market exist and mostly used in office and casuals. Especially nowadays people living in smaller spaces. 2. Power & Cost, while 2 midrange GPU is cost less than just one powerful GPU, its cost more in bills, maintenances, and other parts. Forcing you to buy specifics mobo, bigger PSU wattage, bigger case, better cooling but expensive, etc. Not ideal for casuals/people with budget, which contribute much more to GPU markets than few people that can afford/need to buy SLI GPUs and other specific parts. 3. The development of softwares/games itself not needing SLI. Since this combinations usually used by tech influencers, miners and machine learning/AI which is much smaller market than people buy single GPU. And I rarely hear/see any general games or software needed/actually have features benefited by SLI config. Maybe back then there is few but not nowadays. So bcs SLI is not that popular compared to Single GPU. 4. AMD giving up Crossfire and NVIDIA eventually dropped support or any development of it few years ago I think. No competitors and market for it. Why invest more? But I do hope they bring it back more. Since in today era of higher up GPU is so goddamn expensive, AI everywhere and videogames more hungry to VRAM (which actually AAA game industry get lazy optimizing textures and more caters to gaming & tech influencers plus assuming everyone using 4090). This is one good alternatives. But hoping theres solutions to its sizes and power consumptions. Also the availability of supporting parts is improved. But again, maybe I'm asking too much lol.

How about 3 Asus 1080 8gb cards in SLI?

In short: Old rendering techniques meant that frames of a game were independent. The CPU could send all the draw calls for one frame to GPU 1, then while GPU 1 is working on that send the next set to GPU 2. Now you just output them in alternating fashion, boom done. New engines have lots of temporal rendering techniques that rely on past frame data. GPU 2 can't finish until GPU 1 is done, and if it has to wait, what's the point? Well if you're a developer it means you can either make an engine that avoids these techniques, but it also puts you at risk of your engine being left behind technologically compared to other studios. You can work around it by letting both GPUs work on parts of the frame that are independent, then have a single GPU finish the interdependent pieces. This is what happened a lot toward the end and why games had far less than perfect scaling and GPU 2 ended up being pretty underutilized. Between tweaking engine and drivers etc, this is an era of gaming where gamers started becoming aware of latency, frame pacing and microstutter. And multi GPU really didn't help with any of that. It seemed like there might have been a second life for multi GPU for VR, as you can render two eyes independently, but that didn't seem to take off either. Modern APIs support multi GPU over PCIe without a dedicated bridge. Developers can still support it. The most recent game I can't think of that supports mGPU is Far Cry 6. Not to mention, mGPU would be wholly incompatible with many techniques like TAA, FSR and DLSS. In the end, many reasons killed it. Not that it's just hard to optimize for, but also it was becoming less and less worth the effort.

The fact nobody has figured out how to do SLI again is absolutely insane.