![]() The cards also did not need a special connection as they would communicate through the PCIe slots on the motherboard. On the AMD side, Crossfire was a pretty interesting multi-GPU technology that was a lot laxer with its requirements and could use different GPUs that used the same architecture. The only exception to this is the RTX 3090, which is a Titan equivalent and should not even be considered a gaming GPU. The reason we are using the past tense for somewhat new technology is that NVIDIA has already dropped support for multi-GPU usage for the RTX 3000 series cards. NVLink worked with RTX 2070 Super cards or better. SLI was superseded by NVLink, the new inter-GPU communication protocol that was developed for the RTX cards and offered higher bandwidth and was overall a better multi-GPU technology. An SLI setup was only feasible in a situation when you were not concerned about cost-effective parts and just wanted the best of the best. The overall process was costly and very limited due to the requirements implemented by NVIDIA. SLI required for the user to put together identical cards with the use of an SLI bridge connector and use special SLI certified motherboards that would be compatible with the technology. SLI was the term used by NVIDIA to describe their multi-GPU technology until the release of the RTX cards. Kevin Townsend on Testing 12.01, 12.02, 12.The first main reason you should not invest or even research the Crossfire vs SLI topic further is that both terms and technologies associated with them are obsolete and no longer supported.Sims Smith on Altitude Management: A Tale of Ups and Downs in the ATC System.Jim Keir on Altitude Management: A Tale of Ups and Downs in the ATC System.Altitude Management: A Tale of Ups and Downs in the ATC System.Really Really Really Really Boring Stuff.In alternate-frame mode, each card only sees every other frame, and thus only needs half the bandwidth – both cards together use the same bandwidth as one card would have. * SLI can operate in “split-frame” mode where each video card takes half of a frame, but this is not so good because a full frame of geometry must be sent to each card for each frame, effectively doubling PCIe bus use. Someday we may work with these technologies, but even if/when we do, they’ll only make sense if you really like high resolutions and framerates and money isn’t an object. ![]() So the short version is: we don’t support SLI/Crossfire yet. That’s a lot of money to pay for fill rate that will be available in about 18 months in single-card form. The performance curve for GPU power is really quite steep, and a dual-GPU system typically costs at least twice as much as two of the single-GPU form. 13 months later, in September of 2009, AMD released the 5870, which could put out 2720 GFLOPs as a single GPU for $400.If you wanted 2400 GFLOPs on your GPU in August of 2008, you could buy the Radeon HD 4870 x2, which is basically two 4870s jammed together on a single card via Crossfire.Not for X-Plane – we can’t take advantage of it right now. If we can run 2560 x 1440 at 20-30 fps on one card, it would in theory be nice to run at 40-60 fps on two.īut the next generation of GPUs is on the way, so it may be that the next generation of cards will be fast enough on their own. X-Plane 9 can’t even max out a single GPU from the previous generation’s top end cards, so there’s really no need for two of them.įor now there are resolutions where two GPUs would be necessary to get better frame-rate. Would SLI/Crossfire be useful for X-Plane? But I can’t promise anything – for all I know we may someday hit some horrible show-stopping problem. If we can get our code clean enough to work with these technologies, I will post an update on this blog. Will X-Plane 10 ever take advantage of Crossfire/SLI? If you have an SLI/Crossfire setup, I would expect you to get the same framerate with only one of the GPUs. From what I can tell, there are a few sites in the code that need to be reworked a bit to be ready for these technologies. Neither X-Plane 9, nor 10.0, will be capable of running with Crossfire or SLI. Now to try to answer some often-asked questions:Ĭan X-Plane take advantage of Crossfire/SLI? The idea is to double the shading power of your graphics system by having each card render every alternate frame.* You can get SLI/CrossFire with two GPUs and an appropriate motherboard, or by buying one of the monstrous “x2” GPUs. This begs the question we get asked all the time: what about SLI/Crossfire?įor those of you not familiar with SLI and CrossFire, they are technologies (from NVidia and AMD respectively) that use two graphics cards to share the load of drawing a 3-d scene. In my previous post I described some of our findings for X-Plane 10 with respect to GPUs. ![]()
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