3090 Ti FE Cards... in SLI?

[WR3ND]

Just when you thought you were rid of me, I'm back in the black.

But yeah, this game used to work great in SLI on my Titan Black cards up until Odyssey came out and Horizons was updated.

I'll probably get enough FPSs either way, but that's kind of besides the point. I'll fiddle around with it and see what's what.

Cheers!

o7

 

[Feitochan]

SLI is effectively dead since no modern game supports it and support for it was likely stripped out of ED when odyssey was released.

Also, you'd need your own power plant and a several thousand watt PSU to do that on modern high end GPUs

 

[DjVortex]

I'm surprised the RTX 30 series even has hardware support for SLI anymore (does it?), given that NVidia has dropped the entire SLI concept many years ago.

I suppose that it was a great idea on paper, but in practice it was not all that useful, especially for gaming, as it seemed to often cause more problems than benefits, and practical speedup was often much less than the number of connected cards. Only some games had support, many would exhibit glitches, and oftentimes speedup was less than optimal.

Of course there's also the problem that modern high-end cards have enormous TDPs, and adding two of them and having the run at full blast would require an enormous PSU, which in itself is also not very practical for most gaming PCs.

(Multiple GPUs can still be used eg. for computing tasks, but they don't need SLI support for that, as the computing tasks can be distributed via the normal PCI-Express bus with little to no drawbacks. SLI was more intended for rendering frames faster by distributing the rendering load of different parts of the screen to different cards.)

 

[WR3ND]

Yes, as far as I know the 3090 Ti cards are the last "consumer grade" cards to support SLI through an NVLink bridge. The bridges themselves are going for like 400 USD used on-line now for some reason. It's kind of nuts. They're those 4-slot/80mm X shape design ones.

There are features of the APIs at least in DX12 and Vulkan that can make use of multiple graphics cards. My PSU is 1600W, upgraded from my ~10 year old 1200W one.

Official support is effectively dead, but that's not the same thing as the thing itself. Hardware/software as a service isn't my religion, hence fiddling around with it.

I guess by modern standards that would make me a "necrophiliac?" Ecosystems of forced obsolescence are very weird things indeed!

I should probably clarify that other than some moderate gaming I'm also using the computer for AI molding and scientific research both personal and distributed computing in BOINC projects. This is just for fun. It's giving me some post-geek-apocalypse vibes.

Cheers.

 

[GroG79]

GeForce RTX 2080 Ti was the last SLI card

3090ti comes with NVLink. This is not the same as SLI

 

[WR3ND]

SLI isn't the connector but how it's used. Sorry, the question mark in the title of the thread was a bit rhetorical. I meant it more as: let's see if I can get this working and if so how.

There is SLI support in the Nvidia Control Panel if you connect them with the bridge, so the drivers do or at least can use the cards in SLI.

Profiling though is another matter. The Nvidia Control Panel settings only have a few rendering options. I will very likely need to use external tools like NVIDIA Profile Inspector to make a custom profile for the game to see any beneficial results, if any.

 

[WR3ND]

Also it looks like the game is still on DX11, so taking advantage of DX12's built-in multiple GPU support isn't an option. So it looks like SLI is the way to go if I'm to get both of the cards working for the game.

Cheers.