Re: NVIDIA SLI is dead in the water. How will NVLINK benefit the next generation of gamers
2020/11/12 21:14:02
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Digital_Fuzion
How will NVLINK benefit gamers in the future? Or is that dead already? And why did NVIDIA heavily depend on game developers to support SLI to begin with? I assumed NVLINK fixed this problem by stacking both VRAM and GPU power into one source from both cards to scale graphics. It appears NVIDIA's future is now based on single GPU architecture.
Well it wasn't entirely Nvidia that's to blame for killing SLI, part of that has to do with Microsoft and DX12 giving lower to the GPU access to hardware functions. It was supposed to be better for multi GPU systems and in theory it is, but the onus is on the developers to create multi GPU support. As is widely known, developers will not waste precious resources and time coding for something that almost no one uses. So without direct support from either AMD or Nvidia, mGPU modes are often disregarded almost entirely.
As for NVLink for consumer cards it was never pooled VRAM access. NVLink on Geforce cards works pretty much the same as SLI did on previous generations. The NVLink just offers much higher bandwidth and a lower latency interconnect. All data in one GPU's VRAM banks must also be mirrored in the others. VRAM pooling was and still is only supported for Quadro cards.
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