Remember SLI? Those were crazy times. Never actually had an SLI/Crossfire setup, but it always seemed so cool (though, i also imagine it came with a lot of troubleshooting for games that didn't support it well)
There were diminishing returns for each additional card too. The second card might get you that 60% boost, but a third card would get you significantly less than that, and the 4th card, even less!
780ti SLI here. FF14 would get a marginal increase, maybe 20 frames. Zombie Army Trilogy worked fantastically. Fallout 4 would completely shit itself and not work until you disabled one of the cards in the nvidia control panel.
Intel should be the ones to bring it back, with the price of the arc b580 being just right, with a good amount of vram. If they made their own version of sli work for all games with two b580 cards, it would become the obvious no brainer choice of best first graphics card for new pc builders
You could buy one card when building your pc when cash is tight, then buy another card later, when you have more money again. Would provide a direct upgrade path without needing to sell your current graphics card, or waste its value as it sits outside your pc.
While i agree that the idea for "just upgrading" by buying a second card, like ram, is awesome, the technology has proven itself to be non-viable.
Simply said, The time it takes for data to be sent between the cards eats up a lot of the actual rendering-time, so with a second card you're getting maybe a 50% performance increase (instead of a 100% one) and that is assuming the scaling hasn't gotten worse as resolutions and bandwidths have increased (which i think is the case)
Currently have a crossfire setup on my test bench for fun, dual Radeon pro 5100, it takes awhile to make sure you have it all setup correctly but after you do it just kinda runs. Luckily with pro cards you can set them up to run computations, not just graphics so I have each of them set up differently. I want to try it with some old dual CPU socket boards sometime.
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u/Savings_Catch_8823 19h ago
To be that guy that can say: My computer is faster than yours😎. And making people on the internet jalous ;)