Sajin

 
Oh, for the love of God.  I'm over this launch already.  WHY wouldn't they tell us this up front?  

So a couple of points I'd like to raise..
 
1. Will this affect previous generation cards through drivers? For example, say I go tomorrow and pick up 4x Titan X's, (which AFAIK have always been able to do 4-Way SLI for games without issues other than poor scaling), will this come along as a driver update and limit that setup to only 2 cards working for games? Or, say I get 2x GTX 690s, what will happen to them?
 
2. Multiple card SLI would be a lot more popular in general if it weren't so expensive(my $.02). Most of the general population of PC gamers can't even afford 1 GTX 1080, let alone multiple. Now that 4K is a lot more mainstream than in the past few years, more and more computing horsepower is needed, the logical thing would be to continue support for 3/4 cards and focus on getting flagship cards to lower price points(edit: where they could sell more volume). I think it makes sense especially considering higher resolution and refresh rate screens are hitting the market that are able to max out even 2 cards. (IE, 5K, 144hz UltraWides, 8K soon, etc.)
 
3. With this all in mind, I wonder how big AMD cards will go later in the year, especially if they support 3/4 Crossfire. I could see the big money gamers and enthusiasts getting 4 flagship AMD cards to drive high resolution/refresh rate/benchmarking setups, assuming that they will support 3/4 card Crossfire.
 
And finally, I do wonder if this means the end of dual GPU Nvidia cards, even if they were to release a GTX 1090 (dual 1080 GPUs), it would pose zero advantage over the 1080s, since you couldn't add a second to it.

Nvidia ditches ‘enthusiast key’, limits 3 or 4-way SLI to specific apps
 
June 9th, 2016 at 7:16 pm - Author Matthew Wilson
Back when Nvidia first announced the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, we began hearing reports that there would no longer be support for 3-way or 4-way SLI. However, once the review embargo lifted, we learned that Nvidia had plans to introduce an ‘enthusiast key’ which would unlock the ability to use more than two Pascal GPUs. Now, things have changed once again- apparently Nvidia has ditched the ‘enthusiast key’ idea and will only enable 3-way or 4-way SLI for certain applications, like benchmark tools.
This is according to a report from PCPer, who got in touch with Nvidia to find out what was going on with the enthusiast key solution. It turns out, Nvidia no longer thinks that’s a great idea and will instead allow future ‘Game Ready’ drivers to take advantage of 3-way and 4-way SLI in specific applications, like overclocking benchmarks.

In a statement, Nvidia said: “With the GeForce 10-series we’re investing heavily in 2-way SLI with our new High Bandwidth bridge (which doubles the SLI bandwidth for faster, smoother gaming at ultra-high resolutions and refresh rates) and NVIDIA Game Ready Driver SLI profiles. To ensure the best possible gaming experience on our GeForce 10-series GPUs, we’re focusing our efforts on 2-way SLI only and will continue to include 2-way SLI profiles in our Game Ready Drivers.”
However, if a game developer specifically wants to support more than two GPUs then Nvidia is open to working with them to do that: “Some developers may also decide to support more than 2 GPUs in their games. We continue to work with all developers creating games and VR applications that take advantage of 2 or more GPUs”.
For the most part though, 3-way and 4-way SLI support will be limited to benchmarks for the overclocking crowd: “For our overclocking community, our Game Ready Drivers will also include SLI profiles for 3- and 4-way configurations for specific OC applications only, including Fire Strike, Unigine and Catzilla.”

ok here it go's.    look's  like the way the new brige works it's uses all four off the fingers to get the higher bandwith. so there for if you go to a brige that works in 3 and 4 way you lose hi bandwith. so to get the 3way and 4 way sli and hi bandwith you would have to add a 3rd or maybe a 4 finger to the cards for this to work. and I think this will be what will be the big dif in the ti's and titans that will come. do u see what I am saying?
 

Sajin
Just got this information from watching Elric's 1080 video over at tech of tomorrow. WTH NVIDIA? 
 
 
Video: https://youtu.be/uWvmt9wk0n4?t=7m7s
 
 
 
 
 

EVGATech_ChrisB
Update:

More info about SLI support will be coming soon, please stay tuned.

 
 
 

They probably feel not too many regular users have 3 or 4 way SLI setups so it's not worth the headache.  I am curious, how much more performance do you get over 2 way SLI compared to 3/4 way SLI?