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> There has been no point to SLI in a consumer configuration because there just is not enough I/O bandwidth to support two graphics cards. For what exactly use
by SXX 8y ago
> There has been no point to SLI in a consumer configuration because there just is not enough I/O bandwidth to support two graphics cards.
For what exactly use case there wasn't enough I/O? In case of gaming you can find dozens of tests that will show there is almost zero difference between 8x or x16 on PCIe 2.0 and in many games you can have x4 without any performance loss.
SLI / CrossFireX failed because they both were vendor lock-in technologies that depend on driver manufacturers doing adjustments for specific games since game developers wouldn't care to spend time to support 1% of PC user base.
- SolarNet 8y agoThough Vulkan might finally unlock those powers in a cross-vendor, easy to use way, just in time for both technologies to die out anyway.
- johncolanduoni 8y agoI don’t think that will change the math for most game developers since the SLI market will still be tiny. Every serious engine already optimizes for specific GPUs already, and Vulkan won’t change that need.
- SolarNet 8y agoI meant because Vilkan can make it transparent to use a couple of function calls to enable a second GPU for higher frame-rates. It's a significant API improvement and is cross platform.
- vondur 8y agoI don’t believe vendor lock in has much to with the failure in the adoption of SLI/Crossfire. Lack of support for most games to take advantage of it and issues with games that don’t support the protocol are the main problems.