- As games demand more power, gamers often need constant GPU upgrades, yet high-end GPUs still struggle.
- Combining two GPUs, a once common feature, has been phased out for the general public.
- Many things caused the downfall of SLI, including compatibility issues, performance issues, and cost.
With games becoming more hardware-taxing, many gamers feel the need to upgrade their graphics cards constantly, yet even high-end GPUs sometimes struggle. This makes you wish for the days when you could combine two GPUs into one. This feature has been phased out, and this article will explain why!
What Is SLI?
SLI, or Scalable Link Interface, is a way to connect two Nvidia GPUs and make them work together. SLI comes in a few flavors, like Professional Grade SLI for enterprise-level 3D rendering and Multi-Way SLI, which lets you connect more than two cards together.
SLI requires two cards with the same amount of VRAM and the same GPU die. To do this, you’ll need a motherboard that supports it, as well as a physical bridge to link the two cards together.
Nvidia’s SLI debuted in 2004, and remnants of it still linger to this day. The technology was a marvel when it was released, and it prompted many gamers to buy two of the same card for increased performance.
What Happened To SLI
Brilliant as it might’ve been, SLI is a thing of the past now. The following sections of our discussion will focus on the reasons why this is the case.
Stability Issues
As mentioned before, SLI requires a very careful selection of the two GPUs. Even if you get the same cards from two manufacturers, the difference in the board configuration could throw it off, and even if you get the same card twice, the difference in the graphics BIOS version could create problems.
For these reasons, linking two cards together to get more performance was usually unstable, and buying a higher-end card, if available, could lead to a more enjoyable experience. Making two cards act as one was a very complex task, leaving many points of failure.
Compatibility
Not all games are compatible with SLI out of the box. They have to be tuned to do so, which means that getting two GPUs will not increase your gaming performance throughout every game.
Ever since its inception, fewer and fewer developers have taken the effort needed to make their games compatible with SLI, which made it less of a marketable feature for the average gamer who likes to play a few games.
This leaves the feature in a cycle when it’s not popular enough to be integrated, and it’s not integrated enough to be popular. This cycle played a crucial part in making the state of affairs go to where they are today.
Performance Issues
Though chaining two cards together would reliably give you a 70-90% performance boost (given the game supports it), some aspects would make it feel sometimes.
Micro stuttering was one of the biggest issues with SLI. This mainly happened because of the GPUs being slightly out of sync, which would cause frame time issues when AFR (Alternative Frame Rendering) would be implemented and could cause tearing if Split Frame Rendering was implemented.
Usually, tinkering with the game settings or restarting could fix this slightly asynchrony, but people don’t want to deal with this issue, understandably. This caused SLI not to be worth all the money you spend on it, which leads us to our next point.
Cost
SLI, for the consumer, was a costly investment. Not only did you have to get two GPUs, maybe even more, but you also had to get a power supply that could support those cards, along with paying a heightened electricity bill that is having two cards incurred.
The cost also acted to keep a lot of people out of the SLI bandwagon, which, again, made it something more or less exclusive to the enthusiast tier of gamers.
Is SLI Gone For Good?
Though SLI is something that card makers and game developers don’t pay attention to anymore, it is still very much in use for professional workloads and server applications. Sometimes, you need the pooled memory of a few graphics cards to get the quickest render or to make your language model work faster.
The RTX 3090 had an NVLink port on the side, and though it got axed with the RTX 4090, it could come back in a better and stronger way, but its very nature will cause a lot of people never to feel its power.
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[Editor-in-Chief]
Sajjad Hussain is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Tech4Gamers.com. Apart from the Tech and Gaming scene, Sajjad is a Seasonal banker who has delivered multi-million dollar projects as an IT Project Manager and works as a freelancer to provide professional services to corporate giants and emerging startups in the IT space.
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Sajjad is a passionate and knowledgeable individual with many skills and experience in the tech industry and the gaming community. He is committed to providing honest, in-depth product reviews and analysis and building and maintaining a strong gaming community.
