do you remember a time not so long ago when one of the hallmarks of a super
high-end gaming rig was having multiple graphics cards and why not you could get
high settings high resolutions and high frame rates to a point unattainable by
mere mortals but here we are in 2019 and it almost seems like things have taken a
step backwards in that it's becoming less and less common to see sli and
crossfire setups so why is this the case
when gamers are still interested in getting the best experience possible so
as we partially explained in a previous video part of the lack of appeal comes
from technical issues inherent to the platform you see in a dual GPU setup
each GPU renders every other frame in a process called
alternate frame rendering which makes intuitive sense but not only do the
cards have a hard time syncing up with each other producing a visual glitch
called micro stutter afr also doesn't
always play nicely with more modern anti-aliasing methods that rely on data
from the previous frame to guess what the next frame should look like and
newer technologies haven't completely solved the problems that cards in a
multi-GPU setup have communicating with each other on the NVIDIA side although
there's a new bus called nvlink which has greater bandwidth than traditional
sli not all of its features such as resource
pooling work with consumer grades cards it was designed for professional GPU
compute applications in mind not gamers newer apis such as vulkan and directx 12
also haven't made the situation any easier for the average consumer you see
in the past sli and crossfire took a more active role in handling the task of
splitting game workloads across cards however newer apis give more control to
the game developer so that they can code for multi-GPU in a way that they see fit
and although this sounds like it could lead to games using multiple cards more
efficiently it turns out that developers simply
don't want to take on the burdensome extra workload of coding specifically
for a setup that not many people are using so lots of modern games simply are
not well optimized for multi-GPU and as if all these issues weren't enough to
keep gamers away from sli and crossfire the fact that cards are now more
powerful makes multi-GPU even less appealing although many of us marvel at
4k ultra wide and multi-monitor gaming
battle stations the fact is that most gamers are still playing at 1080p and a
solid single current gen card can run most games at high or even maximum
settings at smooth frame rates which wasn't necessarily the case just a few
years ago this means that a problem that multi-GPU has already had buying two
cards and then having a single card from the next generation come along and
provide more similar performance is even more pronounced nowadays and with many
gamers simply not caring about niche setups with diminishing returns or
having the money to even afford them if they do care
there hasn't been a compelling case for more multi-GPU adoption and of course
being surprised that sli and crossfire aren't more popular presupposes that
graphically demanding games are dominating the market
while there still are plenty of beautiful aaa titles that end up
becoming best sellers there's been a resurgent interest in 2d and retro style
games that don't require nearly as much computing muscle to run
you simply do not need a 2 000 multi GPU
rig to run cuphead or sonic mania and even many popular current 3d titles like
fortnite don't require expensive hardware as they're designed for broad
appeal rather than the best looking graphics possible then again if you're
the type of person who drives a lifted truck just so you can have the biggest
vehicle on the block shelling out the extra money for a second graphics card
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