Also, what kind of power supply do you have? A few years ago, I went crazy and did SLI on two different generations of Nvidia GPUs. I'd only do it if you already had one 1080ti and wanted another one for 4k/60/ultra or 5k/60/ultra or 1440p/144hz. Only the $1,500 GeForce RTX 3090 will support it in Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 30-series lineup, but won't receive SLI … I used two for bf1 but between the weak cpu and the lack of power from a pair of 1080’s it didn’t work out well. (Even with the jacked-up prices currently). When SLI works (80-90% of the time) 650m SLI 50-60% better than 660m. Even if you want to play on ultra-settings, you’d be better off investing in one single powerful GPU which will provide your gaming needs for much less money, time and hassle than SLI. It's just that we are on the cusp of a new generation, and while you might not be able to afford Volta depending on your budget, there will be a short period of time when current 1080s or 1070s, or even the Ti versions of these, will likely be cheap enough for you to purchase, especially used. So, 1080Ti may be worth SLIing up for some specific purposes. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Thank you for helping and not just telling me to buy a new card. I think it's worth getting a 2nd one and then selling the pair once the 1080's go down in price because that will beat two 970's for sure. If you exclude non scaling games, SLI scales by over 70% on average. It's just that we are on the cusp of a new generation, and while you might not be able to afford Volta depending on your budget, there will be a short period of time when current 1080s or 1070s, or even the Ti versions of these, will likely be cheap enough for you to purchase, especially used. Sell them, get a 1070 Ti or 1080 Ti instead of ripping apart your entire system to turn it into a 700W space heater. I'd have to upgrade my psu but is it worth it? A single 980ti performs the same if not more in many cases, than a "simple" 1070. so f you get SLI now you will be prepared for the future games to come. Well the main problem with SLI is that not all games can support it. I've had 2 970s for a little over 2 years now. Imo it's only for enthusiasts who spend time tweaking their hardware and even then getting it to work in every game is hard. It just stops making the old one and expects anyone who wanted a 970 to buy a 1060 instead. Most of the time there will be a a significant increase, sometimes there will … Smaller studio often don't have dedicated resources to go DX12. For most, SLI will just be a waste of money that won’t produce much of a reward. Personally speaking, I've used SLI since 2014. What I've found is in the end it wasn't worth it for me. Am just wondering if it's a good idea to buy another 970 for SLI, or just wait for new cards (which I don't know if I can afford) to come out. ReddIt. You don't lose much. SLI really isn’t worth it today for the vast majority of gamers. Frame times are much better with multi gpu. Well at this point I've already got the other card. I've bought cards in SLI ever since the 4 series cards. Being so low level hurt the adoption rate of DX12. So I'm in the situation where I have 2 980 ti's. Tested: The payoff in buying Nvidia's $40 SLI HB Bridge Nvidia says you need it to get optimum performance from dual GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs. And they don't offer that super fancy SLI / … Then one day I went to check the shipping on my motherboard and the buy option was available for the Ventus x3 (yes the first search result on my browser is the 3070 because I checked that link 1000 times). Anything below that is not. In other words, the best advise a man could give to our friend here is, either stick to his SLI setup for some more years or get AT LEAST, an 1080ti / 2000 series after price drop. That said 4k+ is where SLI/CF comes to the rescue. I didn't want to drop $550.00+ on a 1070 only to have it out performed by two 970's. No. 1070ti is not that faster.In AAA titles were SLI scales (and not Indie games like most of you poor anti SLI fanboys play) it beats the 1080. But it finally came, it was worth the wait :D In DX12 the API has gotten very low level and we have to do a lot of the work that the drivers used to ourselves. I’m not 100% but I think adding another card doesn’t even get you a 50% boost. My 2 cent if you are gaming at below 4k just get a single GPU and don't waste your money. If you do 3D rendering you also get 100% scaling when you add another card. My two cents on SLI is its value is relative. Specifically for your situation, while a second 970 would likely get you good performance on your 1440p, I wouldn't recommend it. Nope. If you’re not sure what SLI is, its an NVIDIA technology where it uses 2 or more video cards to render what ever you’re seeing on screen. I don't care for the heat (Gamers are supposed to have appropriate cases, not some 15 yo tower than doesn't support front fans or liquid cooling) or that my electricity bill will require to pay 10 more euros per year, because I stuffed my rig with 2 cards instead of one. I would always recommend sell your 970 and get the best single gpu you can afford, your experience will be much better. Is that still the case? Go for the SLI'd 650ms. Just my two cents. As of today, there are only 14 games where 2x SLI RTX 3090 will work. I currently have two GTX 970 in SLI and although all the games I play run alright: (PUBG, … The ones that don't can often enable it manually using nvidia inspector. What kind of gains could I expect from it if say there both running 1450mhz no boost? If you want to do downsampling, SGSSAA, and have picture perfect image quality, you need to have SLI/Crossfire. If it isn't really worth it id probably sell the least overclockable of the 2. I am a happy SLI user my self, for years. Just do your research beforehand so you know what to expect. This Subreddit is community run and does not represent NVIDIA in any capacity unless specified. Probably about 95% or so of the games that I play are supported in SLI. Yeah, like the ATi 9700PRO which was able to play DX9 up to 3 years later after it's debut. An evga classified and an evga sc+. Have a GTX 970 w/ 1440p (144Hz) monitor. A lot of games, including the majority of hit titles, get official SLI support at some point, but it could take some time. Ultimately for your usage scenario I believe a 1070 Ti is what you want, so if you can find it at a price you can afford later this year if/when Volta comes out, you should do that. Everyone who has said "no" clearly has never experienced SLI at its best. By using our Services or clicking I agree, you agree to our use of cookies. The fact that SLI and CrossFire setups are relatively rare has caused a bit of a vicious circle. The ignorance in this thread regarding SLI is staggering. SLI is finicky and frustrating for only a 30% increase in frame rates for some games, and less for others. If you buy 2 of the top performing cards how do you get less. Hi Neowin Members, Need a bit of advice please! So what’s the point? I wouldnt count on it. Most PC gamers do not buy $60 games on day 1. So I am thinking of upgrading to an RTX 3090 coming from a 1080 SLI setup. Given current GPU tech there is just no way for one GPU to consistently give you frame rate at 4k+ at 60fps. I think that SLI to a point would be worth it just watch the video and you'll get my point of view! The site may not work properly if you don't, If you do not update your browser, we suggest you visit, Press J to jump to the feed. It isn't all that bad as people make it to be. Don't forget the SLI latency component too, which is why i didn't mention any competitive games, I switch back to single and 1080p on my monitor for those, it works flawless. To enable SLI on Nvidia cards, you must connect them with something called an SLI bridge. Newer AMD cards do not require such a bridge to be run in CrossFire. If a game doesn't play nice just force 1 GPU in control panel. Have you ever wondered why people still setup SLI in their gaming PCs even though almost no new games even supports SLI. SLI support is a different question but I'm in luck, because the games i play RoTR, GTA V, Far Cry 5 and Fallout 4 are all fairly recent and well supported, that's all i need. Period. If you do, SLI might not be the best thing for you. I can play modern games on high settings, and it looks amazing at this resolution. GTX 980Ti vs 970 SLI. SLI scales on average by 50% if you count non-scaling games. Many early DX12 implementations were often slower and buggier than their DX11 counter parts. also,sli won't be supported (atleast) may not be supported in all games and might not give its full potential each time. The mistake people make is buying 2 lower end or mid range cards and using them in crossfire/SLI. You're probably going to be better off waiting for Volta at this point. If you know the games you play work well with SLI and you're willing to tweak it, it's worth it, especially if you don't know if you can afford one of the new cards. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts, i9-9900K 5.1GHz / 3090 OC / Maximus XI Formula / Predator X35. I recently picked up a 2nd 970 for my new build I have an i7-8700K and 16 gigs of ram. SLI is good if you want the absolute best performance, but you will always get much more consistent results with a single GPU setup since SLI leads to potential compatibility problems and some games don't even use it. The real question is cooling as I'm running a 240mm aio for the gpu . Press J to jump to the feed. Please advice. Lets also look at how likely SLI is to be supported in the future. I play at 4K so SLI is a necessity. I play at 1440p as well, although only at 60 Hz, and they do surprisingly well. SLI makes sense only if you have the fastest single card and for your use that is not enough. Being a game dev I can tell you SLI has always been a low priority for us. That said, you can probably get a good $150 off that 970 if you needed to mitigate the cost of upgrading. This Subreddit is community run and does not represent NVIDIA in any capacity unless specified. EDIT: If NvLink ever makes its way to geforce cards, it hypothetically could be used to allow linear scaling with multiple GPUs, but nvidia has not mentioned this at all. This isn't something I would do now, but probably closer towards the end of the year. Don't forget the SLI latency component too, which is why i didn't mention any competitive games, I switch back to single and 1080p on my monitor for those, it works flawless. A lot of E3 demo were done on multi gpu system so multi card support should be the norm for late 2019 to 2020 titles. I did not realize it could be forced through nvidia inspector. You have to use 2x SLI RTX 2080Ti or older to get SLI support on like those 500+ SLI profiled games. No, the average fps will go up but at the drop, it makes no difference. Not because SLI is bad; it's not, and I know this first hand after a year of having 1080's in SLI. I am on the crossfire side of the fence with 290x and I won't go back to single card again. What PSU are you currently running? Thank you for the actually helpful answer. If no, upgrade the PSU and try SLI. check so a 6800gt may overall be better though future games may suport sli also,only point 7800gtx sli or 512mb geforce 6800ultra but won't you rather take the 7800gtx sli so rather go for that as it may be faster And out of necessity (for demo and marketing), we are now slowly forced to implement explicit multi GPU for DX12 (with a lot of help form AMD and Nvidia). What does it's best case scenario matter when it encompasses 25% of games. A place for everything NVIDIA, come talk about news, drivers, rumors, GPUs, the industry, show-off your build and more. Lets take a look at this from both the looks, cost efficiency, and preformance. The answer is it depends on your budget, and how you’re going to use the computer. If you have the PSU headroom, go for it. I know that going forward SLI is pretty much dead so I want to get the fastest card I can. Having two GPUs looks really cool through the glass panel, but in practice it’s not worth the hassle. However, I wouldn't SLI previous generation cards, especially the GTX 970. Some games leverage SLI well, others dont at all. Frank's right. whats good about upcoming games like crysis 2 is that it will take full control of SLI. Is it really worth it to combine multiple graphics cards? GL, depends if you have the money for it or not and if you're techy enough because SLI requires a lot of times. SLI support is a different question but I'm in luck, because the games i play RoTR, GTA V, Far Cry 5 and Fallout 4 are all fairly recent and well supported, that's all i need. Cookies help us deliver our Services. In DX11 days it was really up to AMD and Nvidia to provide the game specific SLI profiles. I guess I could get a 120mm aio but not gonna go full loop. Next gen I am not going SLI. A place for everything NVIDIA, come talk about news, drivers, rumors, GPUs, the industry, show-off your build and more. Do you have G-Sync monitor? If buying a 970 is what you can afford, sure. Generally speaking, it depends on the games you play and how much effort you're willing to spend to get SLI working when you come across a game that isn't compatible with SLI out of the box. IF you have a high level of tech skills, and you want to game at high resolutions (3440x1440 or up) then it can be worth … Is this a worthwhile upgrade? As an sli user no it's not worth it for the average user. I didn't want to celebrate yet because it was coming in 1 month. Source: Ran 550ti SLI and 770 SLI, now run a single RX480, eyeing up a 1180ti later this year. The SLI fanboys will be along shortly to downvote and explain why spending more to get less is a good idea. Do not waste money on second old card, use it towards a new card. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts, 9900k/8700k 5.1ghz, 3090 Strix Rog/2080ti, https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/search?q=sli+worth+it&restrict_sr=on. If yes, probably no SLI for you. Would it be worth to buy another GTX 1070? Yes, SLI is absolutely worth it for power users. i did sli 2 times ... never again... lol but that was years ago its probably better now . I've read a bunch of stuff saying it's not tremendously supported. Even if Volta isn't affordable, there's a good chance you'll see a lot of second hand GTX 1080's hitting the market for a decent price. SLI is dead on DX12 because there is A LOT of work and time to put in by game devs to optimize everything for SLI or CF - well, compared to DX11 atleast. It depends on the resolution, I use 4k for my TV, at that resolution SLI helps, a single 1080 or even a TI is not enough to get a smooth experience with pretty settings. However, since you already have 2 980Ti's, it couldn't hurt to try. Whether or not it's worth it really depends on the games you play, and the resolution you play at. Most of the games that require it support it. I've been running SLI for the past 9 years, and SLI has never been worse than this generation. SLI provides not just higher frame rates but also faster frame times compared to a single slower card, which is helpful for competitive games. People stated that the 8800GTX in SLI can be as fast as a GTX 280, that might be true, specially in games of over a year ago on older, but newer games with lots of shader requirements etc will kill those cards compared to the GTX 260+ which may last longer, as an example look … If you can get another GPU for cheap I would go for it. they allow a system to split the load of processing graphics-related data between multiple graphics cards https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_SLI/20.html, https://babeltechreviews.com/the-50-game-gtx-1070-ti-sli-review/3/. Assuming the system could handle it, sli would be worth it if you can take advantage of it. and a \"bridge\" that connects the two cards together (these usually come with your motherboard or video cards I usually turn down shadows and AA and it's fine. Others are welcome to disagree with me. There's a few things to take into account when considering SLI. New cards are so overpriced right now. I am using SLI since 2012 and never had a Driver crashing, cause of SLI. Support for SLi has been faltering from both nvidia and developers, with every driver update and game update screwing with SLI in some way. When SLI doesn't work (10-20% of the time) 650m 20% worse than the 660m. Not because SLI is bad; it's not, and I know this first hand after a year of having 1080's in SLI. For the gaming I did and do now, it's just not worth … Below 1080ti, just get a faster single GPU. Most of the games I play are SLI compatible, and I have yet to encounter any deal breaking issues that would deter me from going SLI again in the future. Nvidia purposely did some type of hardware or software limitation this generation. Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/search?q=sli+worth+it&restrict_sr=on, I have used SLI/crossfire since it came out and I will never go back to using a single card. The other thing mentioning with this is that NVIDIA doesn't seem to chop the price of its old cards very much when the new ones come out. If you are gonna be gaming at 4k+ with ultra settings SLI will be a must. I picked up my second one for 230 USD and don't regret it. The multi-GPU dream is effectively dead. I'd either grab a 1080/ti, or wait for the next generation of cards. We want to know what the benchmarks say. The best use case scenario for SLI is to obtain a higher level of performance than what the single fastest card can offer. Do you guys use SLI or Crossfire in your builds? Aslong my pocket can handle the cost, I will always get same card, times two. Old DirectX 11 and lower games that support SLI won’t work anymore on 2x SLI RTX 3090. Gulo is correct about your motherboard has to support SLI. Cx600 doesn't even have the connector for sli just 2 pcie plugs. You do have to look out for running out of memory though, nowadays with all this high res textures the 3.5 gigs runs out quick. So it's either sell it for what I bought it for or go full blown and shoot for sli. Can get a useable psu for 60ish. Because there are cards out there that are faster than SLI 970, it would be wiser to go for those rather than a second 970. You have to take the increased power consumption into consideration when adding a second card. That crash might be relevant to other issues and not because you bridged 2 cards you know. ...and right now fastest single card does not even support SLI (Titan V). This ignores the fact that many games can be configured through Nvidia Inspector to be SLI compatible. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Among those PC gamers who do, they go for SLI/CF since it's either FAR better value even if after accounting for cases where SLI/CF do not work (970 SLI/R9 290X/390 CF > 980/Fury is a perfect example of this) or SLI/CF is simply a requirement (3440x1440, 4K, 1440p 144-165Hz gaming). They're still running solid and I may even skip next gen for the ones after that. Looks like you're using new Reddit on an old browser. I think power to price to performance it’s not “worth” it, however that depends on what the cost of the other card would be and the cost of a new PSU. Do you buy the newest games and play them on Day 1? SLI isn't just about performance its also about options like this and running more than 2 displays at once as well I will say though that Nvidia is pretty good about making sure SLI works right esp with any popular game with as few of issues as possible, if you get into 3x and quad SLI thats when more obscure issues tend to come up. I 100% think it is worth it, but do not kid yourself, it does come with a large deal of extra work and sometimes headaches. And next to this, AMD and nVidia have to do their job too!