NVIDIA sli technology was introduced back in 2004 it allowed users to run two
graphics cards simultaneously to theoretically double 3d gaming
performance versus what could be achieved with a single card here we are
10 years later the technology has changed a lot now we have professional
grade sli for 3d rendering multi-way sli with support for three or even four
graphics processors concurrently and a plethora of different operational modes
but the misconceptions about it have stayed pretty much the same so first up
sli only works with cards based on the same graphics processor and with the
same amount of onboard memory you can run these two cards in sli mode because
they are identical these ones will still
work because they are both gtx 780s
that's the GPU or graphics processor with three gigabytes of RAM that's the
memory even though they are from different manufacturers you only start
running into trouble when you want to pair up two gig cards with four gig
cards or two gig cards with different gpus or mix NVIDIA cards with AMD cards
etc so guys it's not gonna work so
please stop trying beyond choosing the right cards setting up sli is pretty
easy you'll need an sli ready operating system an sli certified motherboard with
two pci express 16x slots an sli bridge
and a power supply that can provide enough power for as many cards as you're
running NVIDIA has guidelines for all this stuff linked in the video
description or better yet you can get personalized advice by posting in the
linustechtips.com forum all right so what are the benefits number one as i
mentioned before is better performance especially at higher resolutions like
2560x1440 and 4k number two is better
graphical fidelity instead of running out 130 FPS when your monitor only
displays 60 images per second you can crank up the settings for better image
quality while maintaining an acceptable frame rate number three is it looks
awesome for lots of folks the improved performance while very important is not
the only reason they do it it's shallow but i know i'm not the only one who
thinks this way well gosh that sounds perfect right sign me up we'll hold on a
second it's not all rosy the law of diminishing returns comes down pretty
hard on sli configurations two cards obviously costs twice as much as one but
it's rare for that to actually completely double your performance in a
real world scenario and even less common to see triple the performance with three
cards you'll also see increased power consumption and heat output so you want
to make sure your power supply is adequate your pc case ventilation is
adequate and in some extreme cases your room ventilation is adequate game
compatibility is much better than it used to be but there are still games
that don't have any kind of sli support especially right at release so that
second card might be sitting there doing nothing sometimes especially if you're
one of those people who lines up at midnight to buy the latest games finally
there's the issue of micro stuttering or frame time variants which some people
are more or less susceptible to but NVIDIA has that mostly taken care of
compared to the competition while that last bit probably sounded like i was
pretty down on sli i'm not multi-card configurations are the only way to get
truly next generation performance today and for gamers who want to play at very
high resolutions with very high detail settings and always get butter smooth
frame rates those trade-offs we talked about before are going to sound like no
big deal hence the continued success of sli today almost 10 years after its
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