Hoggle
With NVIDIA no longer releasing new SLI profiles for games they basically killed SLI for any game that doesn’t currently support it. I wouldn’t recommend even SLI on a 3090 since it’s kind of overkill for any SLI supporting game for just a a single card. Only reason for SLI now would be impressive benchmark scores that are otherwise pointless.

^^^ This exactly, once the Devs stopped supporting SLi thru Drivers which incorporated the SLi Profiles, we all started seeing it fade away.
With that being said and someone who ran both SLi for many years (GTX 280, GTX 480, GTX 580, GTX 680, GTX 780Ti and GTX 1080Ti)and even Tri SLi (GTX 580's), I see a lot of myths here:
- SLi (Scaling Link Interface) NEVER stacked VRAM (VRAM recognition / utilization was always limited to the Max VRAM on a single Card).
- Up to and including 1080Ti SLi was great and there were many games (the majority of AAA Titles that fully supported SLi, Drivers had SLi Profiles)
- Games that supported SLi, scaled beautifully, in many cases up to 80% increase in FPS, if a 3rd Card was added (Tri SLi, the scaling increase would only be perhaps another 25%-30% gain).
- For Cooling, most of us were on Water, Air Cooling was simply a struggle.
- For PSU, any of us running multi Cards wouldn't hesitate to ensure we had the right one, I recall my first 1kW PSU was a Corsair HX 1000, back in around 2008/09, so think about that, using a 1kW PSU 12 yrs ago!.
- Yes, you could mess around with nv Inspector and create a working (in some cases) SLi Profile that would force SLi, but it never really worked very well, jittering or borked shader models etc.
 
My last SLi set up was 1080Ti SLi w EK Water Blocks and it worked absolutely amazing with titles that supported SLi, SOTTR was one of many back then.
I know SLi was fading fast (no Dev support, no SLi Profiles) during the RTX 2xxx series, so although the Cards still were designed for SLi, no SLi Profiles within Drivers, meant it was "dying" a rapid death !!!
 
Yes SLi is dead, I'm left with a big case that looks a lot emptier and an AX 1600i PSU, but as was mentioned here and is obvious, the AAA titles now combined with the RTX 3080, 3080Ti's run great with most every setting cranked up (either 1440p or in some cases 4K), so SLi simply no longer required.
 
During the times of SLi popularity, you actually HAD to have multi Cards to run AAA Titles at 1440p (in some cases 1080p) with decent FPS.
Of course benchmarking was also quite popular for the SLi crowd.
 
Overall I'm glad to see it gone, was expensive (2* GPU's, 2* Water Blocks, SLi Terminal Block and more fittings).
 
Very nice to see GPU technology finally catch up to the AAA titles whereby a single Card is perfect!
 
Remember "can it run Crysis ? .....at 1080P SLi GTX 8800 even struggled ;)
 
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-8800-gtx.c187
 
Cheers

veganfanatic
I own two GTX 690 cards so I can and have run quad SLI to prove the nonsense of opinions instead of fact
 
DX12 simply changed the idea to using explicit video card definitions which can mean on Radeon Card and One NVIDIA card such as what Ashes of the Singularity can do
 
I cannot update my benchmark tables as there is such a shortage of video cards 
 

Never was a fan of those dual GPU Cards, the benefit over 2*Cards was increased VRAM, as each Card came with more VRAM IIRC then the single GPU variants.
Quad SLi scaling back then was pretty bad, IIRC was minimal over Tri SLi (had a buddy that ran Quad SLi 580's, EK actually had a Terminal Block for that, was the first time I heard of someone using a 1600w PSU). I believe it was only around 10% gain over Tri SLi, heat was also a big issue, were they under water?
I know I was running Tri SLi 680 Classifieds back then ;)

2 EVGA GTX 1080 Founders Edition Sli  mods and rigs check it out  https://www.modsrigs.com/detail.aspx?BuildID=42692

austin86
 
Can you not add the game profiles by using the NVIDIA Profile Inspector tool anymore? I have not messed with anything newer then the 10xx line so I'm a little dated.

That doesn't work for RTX 3000 series cards.  Only for RTX 2000 series cards and earlier cards.
 

austin86
 
no its not, vram does not stack in sli. having two 4gb cards dose not give you 8gb of usable vram. The link between the two cards card is not fast enough for etch card to use vram independently so vram has to be mirrored across the cards.

VRAM pooling was supported for the RTX 2000 series in Linux and VRAM pooling works for the RTX 3090 in certain Windows applications.  For some some AI and 3D Rendering applications you can have a pool of 48 GB of VRAM if you have NVLink 3090s.
 

demon09
Man I can even imagine trying to cool two 3090 ftw cards one 3080ti is hard enough at 400 watts stock limit having 2x400 just sounds like some insane amount of heat to try and cool if sli worked well in the application

I can cool two 3090 Kingpins and a 5950X with three 360mm radiators.

................................so card 2 just sat at idle looking good in the case.  Wasn't that the whole point; to look impressive, through a windowed case? I mean, bigger is better, right! 

That stinks no sli in 3080 bummer.

In mining you can run several cards at full use and you can mix and match. So it is definitely a software choice and not a hardware problem.

firerain
In mining you can run several cards at full use and you can mix and match. So it is definitely a software choice and not a hardware problem.

The problem is having the cards worth together as one scalable link interface. With mining they are working on multiple problems at once while with SLI it’s both cards working together to make a single frame. It is a lot different since mining would more of be like running multiple games at once with each graphics card running a different game to a different monitor.

Guess the best way to explain it is Mining would be like a pizza place having multiple delivery drivers. They could totally deliver pizzas faster to multiple addresses but it doesn’t make the delivery any faster to if I only one person orders a pizza. SLI was like having one delivery car that was a race car.