NVIDIA Not Supporting GTX 1080 3-Way and 4-Way SLI in Games

NVIDIA’s latest flagship graphics card, the GTX 1080 has received glowing reviews and offers a great performance boost compared to the Titan X while costing less. Even though the UK price is higher than I’d like, it’s still a better option than the Titan X or GTX 980Ti if you need a new graphics card today. Of course, extreme users with lots of disposable income often go down the multi-GPU route to obtain better performance at higher resolutions. Sadly, a single GTX 1080 isn’t capable of perfectly smooth frame-rates when paired with a 4K monitor. In today’s market, the notion of multi-cards is fairly niche and support from developers is sorely lacking. While there’s still some people using 2-way SLI there isn’t many going down the 3-way and 4-way SLI route. Despite this, PC hardware should always be about options and allow each user to acquire the maximum performance within their budget. Sadly, the GTX 1080 has caused some confusion in regards to SLI support and which bridges can be used. If you own an original flexible SLI bridge, this won’t work because it doesn’t provide the necessary bandwidth.  On a more positive note, the older harder bridges seem to work and certainly look the part.

On another note, there’s been a debate discussing whether 3-way or 4-way SLI is even supported. Apparently, NVIDIA’s original plan was to provide an “enthusiast key” which unlocked support for extreme 3-way and 4-way setups. According to a NVIDIA statement given to PCPerspective, this will no longer be the case:

“With the GeForce 10-series we’re investing heavily in 2-way SLI with our new High Bandwidth bridge (which doubles the SLI bandwidth for faster, smoother gaming at ultra-high resolutions and refresh rates) and NVIDIA Game Ready Driver SLI profiles.  To ensure the best possible gaming experience on our GeForce 10-series GPUs, we’re focusing our efforts on 2-way SLI only and will continue to include 2-way SLI profiles in our Game Ready Drivers. 

DX12 and NVIDIA VR Works SLI technology also allows developers to directly implement and control multi-GPU support within their games.  If a developer chooses to use these technologies then their game will not need SLI profiles.  Some developers may also decide to support more than 2 GPUs in their games. We continue to work with all developers creating games and VR applications that take advantage of 2 or more GPUs to make sure they’ll work great on GeForce 10-series GPUs. 

For our overclocking community, our Game Ready Drivers will also include SLI profiles for 3- and 4-way configurations for specific OC applications only, including Fire Strike, Unigine and Catzilla.”

This is fairly startling and means anyone even considering a 3-way or 4-way SLI setup for gaming purposes needs to re-evaluate their plans. On the one hand, this makes sense because it’s such a small niche and many users with this kind of setup are professional overclockers looking to set benchmarking records. However, some enthusiasts with large wallets might invest in a 3-way setup to achieve better performance and employ water blocks so they can add each GPU to a stylish custom loop.  In terms of value, multi-card setups aren’t a great investment and suffer from poor scaling.

Do you think this issue has been blown out of proportion or is it restricting the consumer’s upgrade path?