SLI may no longer be supported, but it’s unclear when production will end.
SLI may no longer be supported, but it’s unclear when production will end.
Multi GPU configurations remain valuable in certain situations. I purchased the Crosshair VIII Hero motherboard mainly because of its multi-GPU compatibility. My tasks involve 3D rendering and animation, which fully leverage both RTX 3090s. NVlink is exclusive to the 3090, yet it’s not essential for my setup except in rare cases. The main concern for me isn’t SLI or general multi-GPU support, but rather the number of PCI-E lanes. Consumer chips like Ryzen 5950x offer only 20 lanes, which limits two GPUs to at least PCIe 8x. This makes it hard to justify a motherboard marketed for four GPUs when each provides just four lanes. Even with PCIe 4.0, performance would likely suffer in graphics and animation. I’m considering upgrading to Ryzen to access all 128 lanes and support up to seven cards at full speed.
It shouldn't be this way. Back when similar concerns arose about cores, multi-threaded code was seen as overly complicated. Much of the intensive effort is already covered by DX12 and Vulkan. Shifting from driver-based fixes to native support hasn't ended SLI or NVLink—it should have made it simpler to integrate such features. The main issue lies in sloppy development habits, which feels counterintuitive since developers invest heavily in complex but niche capabilities like real-time ray tracing, reaching only a small audience.
Prolly still do it as its easy to do and no reason not to. Offered the best gaming for the longest. Just a struggle to have a cpu actually keep up with two current gen cards.
It looks like the X570 mid-range boards no longer support SLI, which means they’re now limited to high-end models. I think they’ll likely have to endure another generation before that happens. While 3090 still offers NVLink, it’s uncertain if it will appear on Alder Lake chips. It might survive in prosumer or industrial uses that demand strong computing power, but the future is still unclear.