when Nvidia released SLI it enabled
gamers to enjoy next-generation levels
of quality today assuming of course that
they could afford literally twice as
many graphics cards but as monitor
resolutions have grown the scalable part
of the scalable link interface which has
been with us for over a decade hasn't
been able to keep up in spite of fancy
high bandwidth bridges like this one
meanwhile over on the professional side
of things NVIDIA has been pushing a
newer interview communication protocol
called NV link this essentially turns
SLI up to 11 but why would you the
general consumer care about that
well because NV link is coming to
consumers with the GeForce r-tx series
so it is time then to ask the big
question does it make gaming better
that's a lot hardware speaking of big
questions
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[Music]
so one of the first things you'll notice
about a card equipped with nd link is
just how big the connector fingers are
compared to traditional SLI there are
more than three times as wide with way
more pins like seriously a single NV
link finger is wider than the entire SLI
connector setup it almost even looks
like they're little PCI Express
connectors which as we're about to see
isn't by accident so the way that SLI
works is actually a lot like oh here I
have a good prep for this it's actually
a lot like the older scuzzy and ide1
card functions as the master in the
relationship and the other one as a
slave or in the case of multiple other
cards they would all then be slaves so
that means that because the master alone
is directing the workload for those
slave cards with at best two gigabytes
per second of bandwidth using one of
invidious high bandwidth bridges
you've got enough for the render results
to be returned to the master and
honestly not a whole lot more this is
the reason why you can't simply add
together the memory of your sli graphics
cards taking 211 gig cards and saying
well I've got 22 gigs of ram now and the
same is true for team Reds crossfire by
contrast Envy link is bi-directional and
it's configured as a mesh which means
that no one card is the master and there
are no slaves think of it more like if
you were plugging computers into a
router or a switch so this along with
the extra pins and newer signaling
protocol gives these cards a lot more
bandwidth more than even PCI Express at
a total of up to 160 to 300 gigabytes
per second that kind of speed lets them
pool
resources in a way that allows access to
each cards memory and koona course as
though they were a single card and
that's perfect for the scientific and
high-end lender stations that nvidia has
traditionally targeted with envy link
now you might be thinking to yourself
awesome Envy link is coming to GeForce
our text cards we're gonna get those
benefits I'm doubling my pre-order hold
your horses there Tom yeah it's awesome
but the number of links provided on our
TX is relatively minimal and the our TX
cards only support sli over the NV link
bus so there will be no fancy resource
pooling going on here so our plan today
then is to take our quadrille GP 100's
and run them both in compute mode which
actually disables the graphics engine
like we couldn't plug a display into
these things right now if we tried and
in what's called sli mode to look at
their gaming performances yes yes I know
this card isn't intended for gaming but
if you look closely at the spec of it
it's got HB m to memory yes and more of
it but it's otherwise actually very
similar to the GTX 10 atti
so this is probably as close as we will
ever get to an apples-to-apples
comparison between sli and NV link since
Pascal is likely to be the only
generation of products where both of
these technologies are present first up
some pre-flight tweaks to get everything
working though we needed a Quadro sli
certified motherboard so our a sous x2
99 deluxe with a kora 970 900 X worked
nicely for this and to look at envy
links non-gaming performance we needed
to configure both cards in tesla compute
cluster mode which we can check by going
ahead and running this command in the
windows powershell so you can see right
here links 1 2 3 are 0 to 3 excuse me or
1 to whatever the point is they're all
running and
that's good unfortunately many of our
benchmarks actually didn't cooperate
very well with this particular setup
though the latest experimental blender
build managed it and pull the results
pretty much speak for themselves three
and a half minutes for gooseberry 20
seconds for BMW in spite of these tests
not being particularly memory intensive
we are seeing a clear advantage here as
for lux marks lower OpenCL performance
scaling that suggests that cuda is a
necessary ingredient if we want to take
full advantage of envy link big surprise
of course that's not all there is to it
though
remember how NV link allows us to
utilize all of the available memory in
our cards as though they were one big
card well because of that we can now
work with much larger data sets than
would have been possible on smaller
configurations and trust us we tried on
smaller configurations you can see here
even our twinned GP 100's couldn't
handle this particular workload so it's
time to bring out the big guns GV 100s
with their new envy link bridges will
give us a total of 64 gigs of HBM to
memory that's more than the system
memory of even many workstations and
there it is our GV 100s handle this just
fine so that's super impressive and
extremely useful for people with huge
data sets but the real thing we were
after here was evaluating the SLI mode
that is coming with the RT x-series so
and here we go so in a massive surprise
to no one the GV 100's are the fastest
solution on the block for now in SLI
even at 4k ultra the average frame rate
never dipped below 60
which is huge nothing else can even come
close to claiming that what's more
interesting though is when we look at
the scaling figure side by side so our
GP 100's here these guys seem to scale
better than the GV 100's in gaming and
productivity giving them the best
scaling overall which may suggest some
kind of CPU bottleneck as for the GTX 10
atti well there's huge gains to be made
in gaming but not as much in
productivity so as you might expect with
anything new NB link SLI doesn't scale
the same way for everything but it does
look to be a pretty decent improvement
over traditional SLI about 10 to 23
percent better by our measure with the
potential to dramatically improve
undesirable behavior like micro
stuttering as well or even enable more
than two-way SLI
with decent scaling in the future that
is depending on how much Nvidia decides
to neuter it compared to its
professional-grade cousin you two never
know with those guys I mean one thing we
discovered in the course of our testing
for this video is that the new NV link
bridges here don't work with the old NV
link cards even the pro ones so Nvidia
told us something about consumer n
d-link bridges having fewer pins or more
importantly a slightly different pen out
but could they have made it work I don't
know guys either way NV link has lots of
potential and looks like a significant
hardware upgrade that should only
improve as the drivers themselves
continue to improve so maybe just maybe
SLI isn't dead yet maybe
but you know it's not maybe fresh books
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