a few weeks ago I was sitting in my office reading through a white paper
from NVIDIA in order to make a video for you guys that would simplify and answer
all the crazy questions people had about
the new multi-GPU and SLI configurations for the 1000 series and direct X12 era
armed with the white paper I thought this would be an easy task but within an
hour or two I was collapsed onto my desk contemplating the sheer futility of life
since then I have received answers to my multiple horrendously long emails to
NVIDIA ones that hopefully will allow me
to shed some light on what the hell is
going
on cooler Masters masterc case maker 5
features their free form modular system which allows you to customize adjust and
upgrade make it yours at the link in the video description down below first first
things first the question that has been hotly debated since the keynote where
they announced the GTX 1080 and 1070 is
three and four-way SLI still a
thing no not for gaming only
specifically overclocking and benchmarking applications like fire
strike Catzilla Etc that's it I'm not
even upset I like this move three and four-way SLI are and have been always
such an unjustified viable configuration that telling people very directly not to
do it and going even further by not supporting it contributes nothing to
NVIDIA's bottom line and saves people from lighting their money on fire good
guy NVIDIA but all of that said and this adds a lot of confusion to the topic you
can still play games with three or four graphics cards and you can use the
performance of all of them together just
not in classic S Mode this can be done with MDA mode also
known as multi-display adapter mode or through LDA explicit also known as link
display adapter explicit mode two different methods of GPU cooperation
that are at least somewhat separate from LDA implicit mode which is what NVIDIA
will be using for SLI what okay I'll get
more into those specifics later it's not that bad but here we go basically game
designers can explicitly code any degree of multi-GPU support for their games
including three and four-way NVIDIA Solutions but please note that because
this responsibility lies with the developers don't expect it to happen
much back to the modes which one is best out of the three great question and I
can confidently tell you that we don't know yet I don't have enough stuff to
test and in asking NVIDIA their official response was that they don't have enough
data yet and they need more dx12 multi-GPU enabled games notice that that
part about developers probably not doing it much uh in order to make any sort of
qualitative determination which also means that no there will be no
benchmarks in this video that will come later but I do have many more
interesting things to say so I would I would I would stay so here's what we do
know NVIDIA's new high bandwidth SLI bridge is not required you do need it
for 5K gaming and Surround gaming but if you have one of those fancy LED Bridges
you're fine for for 4K gaming and 2560 X 1440p gaming at 120 HZ and you have a
standard Bridge you can take another step down and do 2560 X 1440p at 60 htz
and 19 20 x 1080 gaming yeah NVIDIA will
automatically notify you that your bridge is not good enough if you try to
push it to a setup that is outside of those specifications so I wouldn't worry
about it much plug everything in see if it works if it does you're good if it
doesn't they'll tell you and you can fix it pretty easily but Luke you lie they
were saying things about Enthusiast key that would allow us to unlock three and
four-way stuff that software unlock does not exist NVIDIA killed it that was fast
and given how clear I've made my position on the merits of greater than
two-way SLI it should come as no surprise that I think it's a good thing
but I also didn't buy three or four graphics cards already based on a
promise that NVIDIA made that they would all work together with this thing called
Enthusiast key I feel like that while a number of customers were impacted by
this is probably fairly low these individuals would represent the most di
hard of the DI hard NVIDIA fans and gaming enthusiasts and they should
probably have it made up to them in some way just saying all right but hold up
let's take a few steps back how exactly does this MDA and LDA mode thing work
well when s is disabled in the NVIDIA control panel your cards will be running
in MDA mode MDA is Microsoft allowing
any set of gpus to be used including cross brand so theoretically you can use
an AMD card and an NVIDIA card and have them be all over the place in terms of
tiers and stuff and it should work you can do this all at the same time
directx12 new feature named shared fences allows for the synchronized
commands to the various gpus and said gpus will be able to share a pool of
memory which resides in system memory all that kind of stuff is cool
when SLI is enabled however your setup will be in LDA mode another Microsoft
Technology the sub mode LDA implicit
allows you to use the SLI bridge to transfer display data between gpus
without interference caused from other agents activity on PCIe and should
through this clearer communication method allow for additional capabilities
by utilizing the bridge but we'll have to wait and see uh what the impact is of
that while in LDA mode if the the games are coded to support explicit multi GPU
they will be able to scale however well
with the amount of cards you have in the system without using the SLI Bridge
again we'll have to wait to see how well this works but this would theoretically
allow you more than two cards and that's
basically all we have to work with at the moment we will have to wait and see
how MDA and LDA explicit modes handle
regular two-way operation compared to traditional SLI and what the three and
four-way situation ends up looking like so here's the final word if you want to
play games with your setup and aren't interested in just rerunning the same
freaking benchmarking programs on the same freaking setup all day you should
probably stick with a maximum of two cards and which mode works best will be
heavily dependent on the game or application you're using oh and I guess
you could run two in SLI and a third for physics if you just really hate your
money you you can do that tunnel bear is
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to tunel bear.com LTT thanks for watching guys if you
liked this video and like spending your money at least somewhat intelligently
hit that like button if you dislike this video and you're like the Joker in that
one Batman movie when he lights the entire pile of money on fire that was
actually pretty sick if you're more like that you can dislike the video if you
just thought that scene was cool and hit the dislike button I won't hold it
against you that's fine uh if you want to jump on the Forum to discuss
everything I said on here and uh argue about things please argue like in a
friendly way discuss if you want to discuss things become a member on the
Forum and if you want to see overclocking on GTX 1080 cuz it's like
weird and there's like P per voltage Point offset stuff click here cuz that's
another video that's like a little Advanced and interesting and NVIDIA
changes a bunch of stuff and I'm I'm going to go have a nap