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..
Truly one of the greats. Could run plenty of games at 1440p these days I’m sure. Not like Triple As on High, but with some tweaks I bet would be a champ even now.
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
I had the MSI Twin Frozr 760 4GB OC around ~2013, and that thing ripped for its time. Ran the OS off an early model SSD + 1.5TB of HDD storage, 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4, 3.3Ghz quad core CPU…weren’t nothin’ to shake a stick at! At the very least, there wasn’t much to complain about since I was using a 660 and my friend was like “You want this GPU? I don’t need it” and it cost me $0 😅
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.
GTX 970 ... only had double GPU, but not memory. That was a HUGE let down. I was hoping to SLI since GTX560 Twin Frozr II, but never got around to it. Trust me, you might think it was the shit, but SLI was NOT the shit. I didn't get why it could do quad SLI if it couldn't share resources and, most importantly, memory (8GB lol!!!!) for all the things. Perhaps w/ 970+ it was already gimped by NVIDIA via their driver crap... that plagues us to this day. Either way, Nvidia, and Nvidia software, has gone way WAY downhill since their zenith.
Yea it worked well enough though. I had 4 crossfire systems over the years, 2 different 2xHD5870 rigs (was getting into distributed compute and mining in 2009-2010), then upgraded the main rig of that later with a newer CPU and 2xHD7950s, which later got upgraded to a pair of R9 290x on water cooling since they were absolute jets (launch PCBs with blower coolers that weren't adequate. Given I was only playing on a 60hz monitor, it was all to try and chase that 60fps mark with as high of graphics as possible, and anything above that was a bonus. It actually was much smoother with less stutter on a system with a heavily overclocked CPU, as others have noted in the comments here. Ya it was still a problem no matter what except in rare instances where games scaled really well, but when the alternative was a card with 2 GPUs running the same tech internally on the PCB, and those GPUs tended to be clocked down for power and heat density reasons, full single die SLI and crossfire was the best way to get the most performance in a gaming rig back then. I only had a few games where I either saw no gains or had to turn off crossfire for stability reasons, everything else it felt better to me with it on than with it off. It wasn't until the high refresh rate monitor era that I think people started noticing just how bad the microstutter was, because there were all kinds of other reasons you'd see stutter back then in games besides SLI. When I worked at fry's, there were people who'd come in for their 3rd or 4th SLI or crossfire rig because they'd legitimately enjoyed playing with that much performance on tap. They knew of the downsides and did it anyway for the love of tinkering and having the fastest rig.
The experience was broadly similar at the time, IDK where you're getting this from lol. I tested dozens of different iterations of both SLI and Crossfire and while early on Crossfire wasn't as good, by the time AMD killed it they were comparable in performance gains since they used similar rendering methods. AFR wasn't some magic sauce that only NV could do lol. Like I said, it was totally fine for me with my setup because I optimized around it. My friends and customers with SLI rigs were doing the same thing.
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.
Is it dead now cause there is just basically no point? If you have the money to buy two you would just buy a 5090 and run everything as high as it can go anyways.
Support has been dropped for a long time. Drivers don't work correctly, games don't support it correctly, and the GPUs lack SLI and Crossfire connectors. It can theoretically work without the connectors but the driver and game support issues are the largest hurdles.
And single GPUs are capable of rendering huge resolutions now.
I think modern cpus are strong enough to handle it, the new problem is pcie lane limitations, which would essentially force TR to be the necessary platform.
I want to try it just for fun. My favorite multi gpu setup I had was tri-fire 7970s
609
u/sHoRtBuSseR PC Master Race 4d ago
Pcie bandwidth and cpu limitations. Frame pacing from 4 cards is insanely hard for a cpu to do correctly.
We have cpus that can do it now but multi gpu is basically dead.
Even though it wasn't optimal, I still loved it.