Nvidia will not be supporting 3-Way or 4-way SLI in games with GTX 1000 series GPUs

Nvidia will not be supporting 3-Way or 4-way SLI in games with GTX 1000 series GPUs

| Source: PCPER Author: Mark Campbell

Nvidia will not support 3-Way or 4-way SLI in games with GTX 1000 series GPUs

3-way and 4-way SLI support on the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 has always been a tricky subject, with many reports coming from several sources presenting a lot of conflicting information.

First, we heard that Nvidia would only be officially supporting two-way SLI, then we heard the 3-way and 4-way SLI configurations could be unlocked if users asked Nvidia for an "Enthusiast Key". Now Nvidia has confirmed exactly how they will support 3-way and 4-way SLI, but this news is not good for gamers who use these ultra high-end configurations.

Nvidia will only officially support 2-way SLI configurations, but they will no longer require an "enthusiast key" in order to unlock 3-way and 4-way SLI support. Sadly 3-way and 4-way SLI will only be possible on a few select applications, including 3DMARK, Unigine and Catzilla. Essentially this means that only benchmarkers can make use of 3 and 4-way SLI.

You can read Nvidia's full statement below.

With the GeForce 10-series we’re investing heavily in 2-way SLI with our new High Bandwidth bridge (which doubles the SLI bandwidth for faster, smoother gaming at ultra-high resolutions and refresh rates) and NVIDIA Game Ready Driver SLI profiles. To ensure the best possible gaming experience on our GeForce 10-series GPUs, we’re focusing our efforts on 2-way SLI only and will continue to include 2-way SLI profiles in our Game Ready Drivers.

DX12 and NVIDIA VR Works SLI technology also allows developers to directly implement and control multi-GPU support within their games. If a developer chooses to use these technologies then their game will not need SLI profiles. Some developers may also decide to support more than 2 GPUs in their games. We continue to work with all developers creating games and VR applications that take advantage of 2 or more GPUs to make sure they’ll work great on GeForce 10-series GPUs.



For our overclocking community, our Game Ready Drivers will also include SLI profiles for 3- and 4-way configurations for specific OC applications only, including Fire Strike, Unigine and Catzilla.

Nvidia will be enabling 3-way and 4-way SLI support for these select applications in a future driver update but Nvidia clearly is only going to be focusing on 2-way SLI configurations in their drivers moving forward.

With DirectX 12 and Vulkan future games will be able to support 3-way or 4-way SLI, but only if the developers code their games with this in mind. These two modern graphical APIs do not require SLI or crossfire profiles from your GPU driver to work, allowing future games to use as many GPUs as the programmers wish, bypassing this limitation in Nvidia's drivers.

3-way and 4-way SLI and Crossfire are very niche configurations and certainly something that we wouldn't recommend to the average user. It is likely that game developers will follow Nvidia's example and focus on multi-GPU support on the most commonly used 2-way GPU configuration.

In simple terms, Nvidia's 3-way and 4-way SLI support only serve to keep high-end enthusiast benchmarkers happy and to allow Nvidia GPUs to be used in world record 3-way or 4-way benchmarking runs of popular benchmarks like 3DMARK and Unigine. Gamers will not be able to take advantage of 3-way or 4-way SLI configurations.

You can join the discussion on Nvidia not supporting 3-way or 4-way SLI in games on the OC3D Forums.

Nvidia will not be supporting 3-Way or 4-way SLI in games with GTX 1000 series GPUs.https://t.co/Rb8Bbgy45t pic.twitter.com/dYXX5ixWgD — OC3D (@OC3D) June 9, 2016

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