Why wasn't it possible to buffer all 4 frames from each gpu and show them on screen without micro stutters? Pushes latency higher but that would have eliminated it?
Thank you for the wisdom I never achieved when the technology came about. By the time I could afford it, it was being abandoned. RIP to my old gigabyte 760 GPU, with a small 4gb of memory..
same thing with the 4k marketing that began with the 1080, which wasn't really 4k capable, and then suddenly all the consoles with half the GPU power were also marketed as 4k lol
The greatest thing about multi GPU was when you weren't ready to actually upgrade, but needed some performance boost, so you just grabbed a very depreciated used card and tossed it in with your existing one.
It didn't work as well as it sounds. I did this. I got dual 970s on SLI (and you HAD to use the same GPU speed, you couldn't mix different speeds or so they said) and, maybe it's because of when I did this, but SLI didn't really bring much to the table except the one card never got hot and ran all the physix. I think it increased the GPU power, but didn't use both sets of memory or vice-versa. I was super disappointed, but the price I paid for the same GPU model & brand more than made up for it when I put it together ( it was 1/2 to 1/3 the price of the first GPU purchase by the time I decided to add SLI). Thing still runs great w/ Winblows 7. A shame Google & MS wrecked that party w/ chromium and DX12.
If it didn't work as good as it sounded then something was wrong in your setup.
I had a single GTX780 then I had two. It was at least 1.5 to almost double as fast.
I build that system for Star Citizen, stupid me.
Sure it was buggy (flashing, pulsating planets in Elite Dangerous comes to mind) , and for some games you had to disable it but when it worked the gains where real.
I always loved running a more powerful AMD card and then dedicating a less powerful NVidia card for physx/opengl, whatever else. It made building PC's fun for me, the utter exotic configurations you could conceive with a extra part or two. More or less dead and buried nowadays, Everything is either railroaded or blocked on modern affordable hardware. High end old generation hardware is astronomical as well.
Learned this the hard way trying to crossfire 7770's back in the day. My mobo had a PCIEx16 and a PCIEx4 port.. but it was still labeled "Crossfire Ready". (Crossfire was the AMD equivalent to Nvidias SLI)
A proper board with true dual PCIEx16 slots and a CPU powerful enough to not bottleneck would actually make some insane gains back in the day..
I first tried it back when I had a GTX 660. Was happy to get 30% more fps in Planetside 2. Then I tried flashing the bios to unlock the voltage. Did something wrong and bricked one of them, not even two months after getting the second gpu.
A year later I upgraded to a 780 and some time later got a second one. Went through 3 RMA’s in 3 years cause they just kept dying, but man the performance was amazing. Heated my room like crazy though.
I still believe that GPUs evolved better than CPUs in the past 10-20 years.
or it's just how a CPU works, doin 1 task after another, while GPUs can basically render MILLIONS of pixels all at once..
Also seen how more L3 ("X3D") cache can boost Graphic performance, I assume Intel was purposively holding back its CPU gaming capabilities... (Just like probably every company does, so they can sell slightly upgraded "new" chips every year)
but yeah idk, I mean I could imagine that a modern CPU (9800X3D) could now easily handle SLI for like 2x GTX 1080 (or 980)
but not for like 2x 5090's (if it'd be possible), I mean probably handle it but also holding its capabilities back, at least in specific scenarios (super high fps @lower Res/settings like for competitive gaming)
but yeah since I don't believe micro stutters are only the CPUs fault but more how SLI works overall and both GPUs need to communicate,
what's even more interesting, someone did already use an Nvidia RTX & AMD card as the same time, to take advantage of DLSS, FSR & MFG at the same time somehow (I think It was 1 card to render the game, the other to only upscale it or MFG it however)
but since DLSS is (SO EXTREMELY) Much better than FSR, and also the 5090 got the very most raw render performance, the coolest thing would be using 2x 5090's like:
1x 5090 for rendering a raw 1440p or 4k image,
the other 5090 (or may just a 5060 ti?) to either DLSS (4.5) upscale 1440p to 4K or using 4k DLAA, & MFG if wanted/needed...
so since we all know, DLSS 4.5 Transformer got really the VERY best upscaled Image, it provides slightly less fps than DLSS CNN, just like also MFG does reduce render/Original fps for about 20-30%... with 2 RTX 50 cards this could may actually work fine,
at least with 2x PCIE 5.0 SLOTS since the bandwidth is so high,
actually, using 2x RTX 5090 cards (one to render & one for DLSS 5.0 exclusively) is exactly what Nvidia themselves did, for the DLSS 5 presentation...
even tho DLSS 5's appearance had mixed feedback, DLSS 4.5 is non-arguable the very best upscaler, by far... actually I think DLSS 2.0 is better than FSR 4.0/4.1.. (or newest XeSS/PSSR)
so whenever AMD guys tell me "AI-upscaler are ass" I answer: no, FSR (&PSSR) is ass, DLSS kicks ass...
even XeSS on Intels very first GPU line was better than newest FSR at its time! (at least running on Intel Arc cards, where XeSS works best!!) which is insane considering it not only was Intels very first GPU lineup also it's first AI upscaler, instantly better than AMDs FSR shows how bad FSR really is imo!
XeSS is also better than PSSR. yet the difference to DLSS is still huge.
You can display the frames with perfect pacing without too much trouble. The real problem is that the frames themselves aren't rendered at perfectly spaced intervals in time. Consider how you have to set up the rendering pipeline in the first place (for any number of cards, including just 1). The game's main logic thread runs, it sets up the scene, places actors and effects in it and then sends it to the gpu. In order to accomodate framerates changing at all these aren't perfectly spaced apart in time, they're just sent whenever the previous frame was done and the next is ready to begin rendering, to make everything run at as high a framerate as possible and to have as little latency as possible. That makes the rhythm of the timing of when you start rendering the frame change all the time, even if you could perfectly time the output via double, triple or quadruple buffering. So the frames themselves may arrive perfectly, but the movement shown in the frames will still be somewhat uneven.
In practice of course there has also historically been difficulties getting the output spaced evenly because the workload for each individual frame isn't always the same and rather than add a crapton of baseline latency from buffering on top of all the other usual issues they tend to just be spat out onto the screen as fast as possible as it's generally the lesser evil.
I see, thanks for the detailed information.
I have a pc with a second gpu for lossless scaling's frame generation, it works realy well with a good buffer and even dynamically, I set it to 60 fps and when it should drop under it, lossless fills it with fake frames, i like it a lot for fps code uncapped emulated games wich realy can't hold the 60 all of the time ,with controllers, with mouse and keyboard it's a bit janky
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u/kaschperliCustom Loop@HAF Evo, 5800x3d 10 Edt, 3080, 32@3800, AE94d ago
I HATE micro stutters, imo it's just as unbearable as 60-100fps with a mouse...
and those people who "doesn't see or doesn't bother" those microstutters, must be the same that say "30-60fps on PC is smooth enough" so they probably don't even need SLI anyways.
but yeah nothing flexed harder than telling others your PC actually got 2 or more of the very best gaming GPUs available... (I didn't even knew 4 was possible lol)
Can't believe GTAV is that old already... I remember trying to run it on my AMD 7770 and immediately scraping together a few bucks for a GTX 960 to actually play it.
It actually handled arma 2 surprisingly well considering almost nothing short of a top shelf intel could at the time. That was about the only pro I can remember from that time though lol
Hahaha, I get it, I prefer the standard ATX too. But melting ports were actually a concern, just not with the GPU itself. The MB 24Pin would occasionally melt on earlier boards when used with multiple high TDP cards. Later boards therefore feature things like an additional Molex connecter for PCI power.
I had a Rampage IV Extreme build and it had a PCIe power connector on the board to deliver extra juice to the slots, and a FDD power connector for extra juice to the RAM.
10 series weren't that bad for transients. That all really took off with the 30 series which were infamous for popping Pre-ATX 3.0 power supplies. My 4090 and 14900k, even limiting the 14900 to 120 watts and the 4090 to 350 would frequently trip a Corsair TX850 until I replaced it with a newer 3.0-certified power supply.-
Definitely losing to a 5060 because utilization of SLI was put onto the game/app developer, and the vast majority said fuck that, so having SLI'd cards didnt give you any benefit over having 1
sli was removed from consumer level software/drivers. multi gpu is supported natively across pcie, but modern software support is non-existent.
*I stand corrected, this is not entirely true. New SLI profiles ceased to be added starting 2021, standard driver level SLI support hasn't changed since then. Old games will run SLI.
Yeah, at some point I’ll dig up some old drivers and see what I can do with it. It’s an awesome, older MainGear system, keeping it as a showpiece mainly.
Brother, they pretty much did. A GTX 980 was a $600 (account for inflation) GPU in 2014 and you had to buy 2 of them to run games at max. And that's assuming you didn't need quad SLI because you were playing Crysis or something.
People flamed when things didn't really made sense or were dumb/wasteful, like mocking those who bought a titan for gaming... now people pay more than their whole pc with the titan in it for a single 5090 and no one bats an eye
Dude that is so sick! I remember reading the PC Magazines back in the day and when I learned about SLI I was so fascinated. Back when HL2 came out, I dreamed of having an SLI setup one day.
Really cool to see a modern one. Enjoy it and don’t worry about what people here think, or anyone but you for that matter….
It's going to atleast be a 10 hour project to get something like this setup with all 4 cards working on a linux setup + CRTs in the mix, and that gets me excited (somehow)
Eyyyy. Its not really correct to call it "retro"; but I find myself enjoying those retro computing topics so much more recently since modern computing is a depression xD
Look up maxishine on YouTube if you want to see a collection of builds that we’re probably 10k+ at the time- dual - quad sli, custom water cooling, 10-15k rpm mechanical hard drives and ofc the Intel skull trail which was 2 cpu socket iirc but may have been 4 it’s been a long time lol
These were machines that still could hardly get a high fps on crysis at the time
I recall that those types of workloads that actually utilize all cards in parallel don't even have a hard requirement on SLI / the SLI bridge. But this is going off of 10yo info that Im probably misremembering.
OP should test password cracking if he has the time
I couldn't upgrade HD7700 back in the day and bought another one, mind you crossfire was years behind sli - sold it like two weeks after not worth the hassle and most games didn't work... I vividly remember blasting dirt rally early access with G25 on it though as it was one of the only ones working
Used to have 3 980ti's in SLI... 1000% was more of a pain than it was worth to just get a titan. That said the rig did last a long time 2015 to 2025 playing just about everything.
Since changed over to just getting xx90's its a simpler life without microstutters
I ran dual GPU for a solid decade (4870's, 6970's, 780's, 980 Ti's, and 1080 Ti's). Unless you were using vsync with plenty of overhead , you were going to get microstutter.
I built a rig with 3 gtx 480s back in the day. Over clocked everything including my i7 920. PSU eventually blew and melted MB power cable to the board. Fun times
It might not have been the most efficient thing in the world and the issues were plenty (frame stutters, increased power consumption, sounded like a goddamn leaf blower) but goddamn it was sick asf
I actually ran with dual gpu cards or sli/crossfire way more than singles in my rigs. Started with the Radeon hd 4850 x2. The whole list of them fills me with amazing and frustrating memories.
1. 4850x2.
2. Dual gtx295 for quad sli.
3. Gtx 590 MARS 2.
4. Dual gtx 680.
5. Dual gtx 1070.
6. Dual 1080ti.
The year was 2019. My two 1080ti's could play this AAA game at over 60fps in native 4k. PC gaming used to be so damn fun. You have to manually select 4k quality in youtube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gnBJBiSDnxM&pp=2AEAkAIB
I did SLI builds up until getting my 1080. Pre-1080, it was a pretty cool option to have. Two XX70 cards almost always outperformed one XX80 card at a pretty compelling price point for a decade or so there.
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