As above really. I remember the GTX 295, HD 4870 x2 and such. Why not anymore? One GPU can crank out enough heat on its own?
Too much of a pita for AMD and Nvidia to make drivers, they struggle enough with drivers for single GPU setups.
Short answer: They were gimmicks to clear out overstock. Longer answer, actually that's about it. With SLI/Crossfire being more or less dead there is little reason to try and sell a card inherently reliant on it to function, plus the speed gains were never great to begin with. I thought some of the Asus MARS cards were cool enough, but all of them were beaten by the next gen single GPU that came after them.
It wasn't just the drivers. It was game support from game devs too. Before we got X86 consoles they had to do a lot of legwork and a lot of libraries to make a game run on pc. Thus it was easy enough to add some sort of afr if Nvidia and or AMD asked them nicely enough. Since we now have console games that require almost nothing to run on pc, and in most cases a different API (DX12) that also requires time and effort it's not surprising that no one CBA to make games alt frame render or use any of the stuff DX12 has. TL;DR it's dead Jim.
these days you are looking close to £1k for each for top end sli/xfire setup im miss running 2 cards but due to the prices we are being hit with i am also glad
I got on the Crossfire ship with X1950 Pro's, continued with X3870's, and then X4870's. I ended up taking one of the 4870's out testing system instability, and found the frame rate went up. I never put the second back in, and haven't looked back. I think the general consensus was dual cards was cool to look at, cool e-peen waving, but ultimately fruitless. I think I read somewhere that Nvidia only supports two GPU's in SLI these days. Which makes me think the days are numbered where it's even supported at all. But I've not looked at CF/SLI since the 4870's, so I might have that arse about face.
I do hope there is some multi GPU focus soon, or much faster single cards, I'll be wanting to push 8k soon enough as 4k is a bit low res on a big screen tbh. If you consider the complexity of the Compute units on these latest GPUs you could consider that they have many Gpus on die.
4K is low res? - I like the fact that I can run 4K res on a 49" monitor with 0% scaling with similar DPI of 4x 24" 1080p monitor in a 2x2 grid, with the awesome clartiy of running games at the native res. Currently with the system in my sig at those clock speeds, it can struggle with some games to maintain 4K 60. So I would say we are a while off of 8K, and especally when game Devs have not long been giving us 4K textures, I can't see the leap to 8K Res, and 8K textures anytime soon.
Would be nice but unfortunately not going to happen, instead we are being downgraded to console peasants with fake resolutions courtesy of DLSS.
I had Crossfire 3870x2 with an 8800 ultra for physx. It was like a nuclear power station, using two PSUs. I started out with two 5770s in crossfire and saw decent FPS, but the experience was bad. I then went over to gtx 480s in SLi. That was awesome. Then I went 670s in SLi, and played around with two gtx 295s. They powered a triple monitor rig for Dirt 3. SLi at one point was amazing. I always had issues with crossfire. Many years later the dropped / runt frame thing happened and AMD were exposed for being cheating liars. No wonder I hated it. They did fix it and I did get a 7990 but that was my last dual GPU card. I avoided the 295? And went with dual (and then triple) Titan black. But the writing was on the wall when we switched to the Xbox one and PS4. It died on that Dev cycle and hasn't really worked since. Sure there's the odd game here and there but with GPU prices as they are and Nvidia derping their cheap cards to stop their big ones being dethroned it simply isn't worth the huge amount of money. For me SLi really died after the 400 series. I remember two 460s giving the 480 a bloody nose for half the price. After that the hamstringing began and it was game over really (not including the 500 cards because they were the same gen).
DLSS is trash... Downscaling the res to 75% yields a shaper image than that with all the effects turned on, with a similar bump up of FPS.
I too enjoy not having to scale but my 43" 4k is only just acceptable at the distance I sit at, 8k probably is too much indeed and would require scaling perhaps 5K on a 46" is probably what would work for me ~127dpi. Though I don't mind interpolation systems or other graphics trickery like checkerboarding if implemented well to make 8k work, some of the PS4 Pro stuff looks and plays amazingly well at 4k having been designed from the outset to use those technologies.
I do and I am, I prefer one big screen to many small screens, mainly because the boring work stuff doesn't lend itself well to being spread over many screens but also gaming works better on one screen.
