Could Multi-GPUs Make A Comeback?

SLI and CrossFire were big business many years ago but saw a slow and painful demise, but why, and could we see a comeback in the near future?

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00:00 Introduction
00:51 Sponsor
01:28 Voodoo2, SLI and Crossfire
03:30 Lucid HYDRA
04:25 AFR, SFR & CFR
05:41 Why Multi-GPU isn't common today
07:28 Visual Artefacts
08:30 DirectX 12 & Vulkan
09:58 Decline in Popularity
11:16 Reduced Multi-GPU Support
13:08 Alternative Technologies (DLSS & FSR)
13:45 Multi-GPU in Professional Fields
14:48 Final Thoughts
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[pmcomputing]

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.

[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 😂

[interrobangings]

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

[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.

[southbronxny]

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.

[johnpaulbacon]

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.

[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.

[radeksparowski]

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

[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

[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.

[PREDATEURLT]

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

[LawrenceTimme]

I ran 2 RX6900 XT in MGPU. It was incredible performance.

[jordanwright]

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.

[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.

[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!

[sabishiihito]

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

[whresmycar]

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

[PaulRoneClarke]

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

[rossmclaughlin]

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 😳