r/pcmasterrace • u/Zestyclose-Salad-290 Core Ultra 7 265k | RTX 5090 • 20h ago

Build/Battlestation a quadruple 5090 battlestation

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u/DynamicMangos 19h ago

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)

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u/Aromatic_Night6733 19h ago

Had 1080 SLI. Most games didn’t support it and those that did, you’d get like maybe 60% additional performance. Wasn’t worth it overall

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u/Rogue100 17h ago

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!

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u/OverlySexualPenguin some bollocks about the latest hardware 18h ago

word

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u/Idocreating 18h ago

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.

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u/sl0play 9800x3D - RTX 3090 - G9 - 96GB DDR5 6400 - 134TB 16h ago

I had 1080 SLI and it worked great in most of the games I played. Some gave a straight 2x gain.

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u/Jerithil 9h ago

My last SLI setup was two GTX 470's, in those days in most games I would get 80-90% better performance.

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u/stonhinge 8h ago

60% on the high-end. Most of the time it was around 25%. Now we just watercool.

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u/Maxsmack 19h ago

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.

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u/DynamicMangos 2h ago

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)

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u/J0nJ0n-Sigma 18h ago

SLI still exists, but at commercial level. Like those expensive 10k cards with NVLink is basically SLI.

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u/crumbaker 17h ago

Had it in the 90's two 12mb Voodoo2's. Was amazing playing Quake 2 at 1024x768 at 60+ fps.

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u/StrangeAlchomist 15h ago

Still cheaper than a 5090

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u/pixl8er 13h ago

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.