Are Developers Taking Advantage of SLI/Crossfire Now?

[Chippy]

As the title suggests.  I've got an older rig: i7, x2 amd5870's, 6GBDDR3 ram, but outside of Kickstarter haven't really bought that many mainstream games.  My system runs hot with some Unity titles (Satellite Reign more than others), and am assuming the bottleneck is the video cards first, and system ram second.

 

My next AAA purchase is likely to be Dawn of War: Warhammer, and don't think my system can make it.

So really thinking of upgrading cards, but might go for the sli option and crossfire to save a bit of money, or I might shell out on a single powerful card (but mostly interested in how quiet it is).

 

But it seems to me that developers haven't really been taking much notice of multiple GPU's and glitches often occur in games that support them...

 

Anyone had different experience?.

[Humanoid]

It's a bit of a false economy, outside of a few brief periods between GPU generations, mid-range multi-GPU setups have almost never been worthwhile. For now it's best to just consider it an option for the high-end, in order to get performance higher than is possible with any single product. Something to keep in mind too is that the GTX 1060 doesn't even support SLI, to give an idea of how important nVidia considers it.

 

As for individual games, support does come, but unless it's a sponsored game, it may take some time after release for it to be available, and some more time yet for it to be mature.

 

That said, with DirectX 12, there is the possibility of pairing up GPUs without either SLI or Crossfire being employed, using something Microsoft call "Explicit Multiadapter". It's something that still needs to be implemented on a per-game basis, but it removes the hardware requirement from the equation. This is somewhat older data, but check out this preview from last year, where the fastest solution wasn't dual nVidia cards, nor dual AMD cards, it was achieved by running one of each in the same machine.

[Bokishi]

I ran SLI for 5 years, and spent more time with it off than on. It's just that you never know, some games might use it after a driver update, and other games will actually lag and shader flicker because it's on. Pretty much every new game has NEVER worked right with SLI right during release. Even Nvidia's new Ansel screenshot tool does not support their own SLI. Right now I just use a single Titan X Pascal. Yes it costs as much as two 1080s, but almost gives you the power of two of them (if you oc) +50% more vram, without SLI headache and epic heat

Edited August 21, 2016 by Bokishi

[Chippy]

I think some games are ok with it (DA:O), comes to mind, generally I've found heat movement is better so the single card isn't running hot/loud.  But yeah, it looks like they fudged it and I'll probably go for the single card.