Trust me, I was quite hesitant to move into an SLI setup after having a similar experience with Crossfired 6950s. It was terrible, and definitely some of the worst times I've had in PC gaming since spending all night trying to resolve IRQ conflicts and making boot discs just trying to get Shattered Lands to run. It's a lot better now, at least on the Nvidia SLI side. I'm sure Crossfire has improved over the last five years, but I have no experience with it.

Because when it does work, which is quite often, I get better performance than any single GPU currently on the market, by far.

Multi-GPU setups certainly aren't for everyone, but for enthusiasts who want the best performance possible, the "hassle" is really nothing. For instance - playing Witcher 3 right now, and it justworks, and I have everything maxed out including HairWorks on everything. When a game doesn't work with SLI, I simply use the second card to force a bunch of antialiasing, or set the game's profile to run on a single GPU. It's actually quite simple. It's literally a few minutes of configuration the first time I play a game, then I never have to change anything or worry about it again.

Recently upgraded to two GTX 970s in SLI from a single GTX 470. It's my first SLI setup ever and I'm pretty happy with it. Witcher 3 and GTA V both run at a constant 60fps maxed out at 1080p.

I had an SLI setup for a few years, until my old motherboard melted, and I couldn't get a new case/mobo combo that supported SLI for my budget.

@humanity:It seemed like such a good idea at the time. I usually buy new cards on a 2 year cycle and thought this would be a good way to extend my life for less money, $300 for performance that easily bested the fastest card available at the time looked great from the outside (I also had a surprisingly GOOD experience with a pair of 8800GTS' back in the day, although in retrospect my standards were probably just lower). It did, but only by about a year and change. Right after I bought my second card VRAM became a major concern for the first time in years (this can be a problem when you use SLI as an upgrade path, although I think a lot of people probably got screwed by this, not just multi-card users) and having to tweak most games and still having to deal with odd glitches and problems that you can only fix by disabling SLI has kind of put me off of doing it again for the near future. When it works it's pretty awesome, but I think it's still hit and miss when you're dealing with older cards on an upgrade path.

Single R9 290 here. Gimme dem TressFXs.

I recently just built my own computer and decided to go with a cheaper mobo and haven't really thought about SLI. Even if I wanted to, my mobo just doesn't support SLI.

I am planning to stick with the GTX 970 until the next big bang for your buck graphics card comes out.

I am pulling ~40fps average on Witcher 3 at 1440p and I am quite happy with it - especially since I've grown accustomed to ~30fps after being on consoles for such a long time.

@mb said:

That's the thing about AMD that is so frustrating; when you can't use the 2nd GPU in Crossfire, you can't use it at ALL. It's just a brick blocking airflow to the one poor card that's now trying to pull double duty, no offloading AA or PhysX or any of that. Also, I haven't had a game just work in years; Witcher 3 puts out unbelievable flicker, so did Dragon Age, so did Shadow of Mordor...

And all that's fine if your system is relatively new; just disable the 2nd card and you can get decent performance out of one. But once your system starts getting up in age, or if you bought a 2nd GPU as a way to extend the life of your existing setup (dumb, don't do this), games become unplayable. I slogged through the last half of the Witcher 3 with a sub 20 FPS because AMD, after weeks of work, could not get their shit together and fix the flickering. Couldn't do it! The 15.5 drivers that came out, the long awaited (a week later than their revised estimates), mythical 15.5 drivers that were supposed to solve our problems upgraded my system from unusably bad flicker with no performance gain to unusably bad flicker with minor performance gain. It's still fucking busted over a month later!

I guess the secret is to wait for non-beta drivers. Shame the last time we had any of those was half a year ago.

So, if you're rolling with AMD, the hassle really isn't nothing. At least, it hasn't been for me.

That is in fact the danger of both SLI and AMD, which is the worst possible combination. I'm surprised that after all these years, literally over a decade now, AMD still can't get their act together. If someone is really willing to endlessly tinker with their system before they launch every game as some form of hobby then it's not a huge deal. For others that want to spend more time in the game and less time in the graphics control panel then maybe less so.

Are you talking about multi-GPU setups in general here, or edge cases like the user above who could never get Wild Hunt to work on his older AMD cards? Because spending a few minutes with a new game to get the settings right and then never worrying about it again is hardly "endlessly tinkering" nor is it "spending more time in the graphics control panel than in the game." If it's the former, I don't think that is really a fair assessment of mutli-GPU setups at all. It definitely was true for me though five years ago with a pair of AMD cards due to their awful driver support, and that experience is part of the reason I own Nvidia cards today. I'm much happier with them.

Seems like overkill for 1080p? I think one 970 should be able to handle those games at 1080p, maybe minus hairworks since it's super unoptimized (atleast in the witcher) supposedly. And if it can't, then they really need an affordable 1080p card to come out

You're absolutely right, it is overkill currently for 1080p. One GTX 970 is enough to hold a constant 60fps at 1080p in most current games but there's a few that fall down to between 40-60fps with one card. GTA V is one of them.

Anyway, the reason I got two cards in SLI is future proofing and the occasional Stereoscopic game. I'd like to be able to max out future games without frame drops for many years to come. :)

Got a 980, will probably just add one when I need it. Intending to go to 1440p eventually.

My approach to SLi or Xfire is definitely a wait and see. For example a lot of UE4 demos do not support multiple gpus (it depends on temporal accumulation for certain things so AFR breaks their implementation).

With upcoming dx12/Vulkan APIs, all the responsibility for implementing multi-gpu is going to reside with game developers and not the IHV. On one hand it is better as you can implement better solutions like SFR, also the IHVs won't have to hack around engines just to get multiple gpus working. On the other hand game devs are going to have to put in extra work to implement full multi-gpu support (versus the current approach where they have to do very little work), where all this extra work is on top of the greater workload to use these low level APIs.

So basically tl;dr Multi-GPU support may improve, but it is just as likely to become far worse.