Gadgetory

what's up guys Jays $0.02 here we're going to talk about something that's near and dear to my heart and I don't mean cholesterol I mean multi-gpu support this is something that I have always been a huge enthusiast of if you guys have followed my channel for any length of time you've noticed that most of my builds that I do that are for myself include multi-gpu even though it's a terrible scaler it costs more money and it doesn't get nearly the utilization it used to in the past it's something that I still truly am passionate about when I want kind of want to talk to you today is towards people who are considering multi-gpu support or multi-gpu setups what you should think about and what you should stay away from because in 2019 it's easy to accidentally waste a craft out of money miss oh man that was a better way to play warships we're gonna play on the computer apparently you haven't heard of world of warships and yeah you play it on a computer well the warships is a free to play strategy game where you take command to some of the most iconic war vessels from World War one and World War two vessels like the HMS hood USS Missouri or the ships that changed naval warfare forever the dreadnought class each ship is recreated using historical photos and 3d scans of the real vessel to ensure the most realistic detail possible so real in fact you will swear you were on the ship itself but we all know that the war is won in the sky so that's why world of warships features a completely revamped carrier play style where you get to take control of squadrons of aircraft performing bombing and torpedo runs to devastate your enemy in fact new players can start devastating their enemies by using offer code play Langley 2019 to receive a free starter pack featuring the USS langley aircraft carrier 302 balloons 1 million credits and three days of premium time now get out there and start putting some shells downrange sailor yeah this is so much fun shit you can start having fun too by downloading world of warships by using the link in the description below so what actually started this whole concept of this video was I was intending to do a dual 5,700 xt system benchmarking to see kind of like hey you know foreigner dollar graphics card let's see how this compares to an $800 graphics card you put two together which was always kind of the thing it was it was common to take like a 950 TI or a 960 or something in sli those and get pretty damn close to like the 980 performance type of error and did with a 400 series cards a 500 but will be noticed was that anything below the 70 series leading up to Pascal was pretty much dropped and and nullified any SLI support whatsoever and so when I realized the 5700 XT could be enabled with crossfire mode although AMD was kind of like you know it's not supported it doesn't mean it doesn't work and because we were able to enable it I started doing some testing and realize there was absolutely zero activity happening on the second card even in titles like 3d mark which are synthetic and they are designed to scale nearly perfectly with multi at least with two cards we were seeing crashes we weren't even getting 3d mark to run it would it would start to load the test I'd get a solid white screen and then it would completely lock the system now we are and and when it comes to AMD you can still actually crossfire things like Vegas 64 and Radeon 7 and all of that it's something specifically with this launch with Navi that they've decided to basically have 0 out-of-the-box support for crossfire what makes that a little bit disappointing is because what we talked about with Pascal was with implicit and explicit SLI or multi-gpu Windows 10 could have done something you know the DirectX 12 is it's got different modes of multi GPU support and it could technically be supported at the OS level it could be supported at the driver level it could also be supported at the game rendering level and I think what happened here and I did a video about this a couple years ago is when you got three cooks in the kitchen now handling multi-gpu support it became a little convoluted where it wasn't just handled with the driver and so I think a lot of people dropped it for that simple fact of there was no way to make it a perfect situation or even scale really well when you too many things too many cooks in the kitchen like I said but Nvidia does still at least support SLI on the series series or the 70 series cards and higher so 2070 2070 super and up does support SLI obviously these are all the Titan RT X's that we've been using in the rip GN series recently we've used 2080 T is these 1080 T is but what happened was even though you do have up to 4 Way SLI is still supported with the Pascal series cards they dropped 3 & 4 way entirely with the RT X series cards so that's why if you go on 3dmark and look at the Hall of Fame and you can see that like on x by extreme and x by and even firestrike you'll you'll see that the top scores are still 4 Way SLI configs running last gen hardware because the new hardware although great still isn't able to outperform ln2 cooled massive modified overclocked 1080 is even the Titan RT X cards so it's an interesting time right now where although that support was taken away it still exists now I'm here to tell you that SLI does still scale nearly perfectly with those synthetic benchmarks things like far cry 5 and 3d mark x by on poor royale with r TX based cards but if you're looking for true gaming performance increases you're not gonna see it with modern titles let's say 2017 ish and newer because what sort of happened here was the need for SLI has changed it was something that was kind of needed no no that's all I goes I'll be back to like the TNT era it's like way back and like the Voodoo cards and stuff like that but it's something that is just not necessarily but it's not something that's really necessary today because what's happened is GPU performance has definitely caught up to the pixel count and monitors 1080p was a super hard resolution to run about five years ago you were talking limited vram on the graphics cards very limited core clocks and core speed the architectures were huge and slow I remember when we first crossed the gigahertz mark the one gigahertz mark when it comes to GPUs it was massive it didn't take long for us to start passing to gigahertz with triple - quadruple the amount of cuda cores that are in the cards quadruple the amounts of ram so the hardware has definitely advanced to the point to where you could run 1440p and even 4k with single cards get 60 FPS just three years ago we still were dealing with the Titan X Maxwell and the 980ti era we still needed two cards to run 60fps with settings around the meat medium to low for 4k so it's definitely one of those things that's not necessarily needed anymore for the resolutions that you're running but now that we're seeing the introduction of 8k TVs and possibly panels it's gonna I think resolutions are about to jump ahead again but I don't think we're gonna see multi GPU support be how we get there I think we're gonna see as a GPU race coming from the manufacturers that's gonna push GPU technology forward even further that's gonna allow us to get more horsepower out of single cards now part of the problem with SLI or even crossfire or any multi GPU support was the introduction of micro stuttering and that's because there's different ways to achieve multi GPU support you would have you know alternate frame major AFR where one card would handle every other frame you would also have like it almost like an interleaving where each card would handle a different portion of the frame simultaneously rendering the scene so there were lots of different ways to achieve the end result and I think because of that when it comes to now the implicit and explicit through dx12 it's one of those things where like I said it's too convoluted and the developers are just not even trying anymore in fact when battlefield 5 first came out the first thing we tried was 20 atti sli with our TX going to see if it scaled at all with our TX and what we found was there was even a menu option in there that was great out for turning on things like RT X or DX R and it warned you like look if you have multi-gpu you cannot run like you will only get zero support whatsoever for turning on DX R so you had to run DX 11 and then you would get multi GPU support in battlefield 5 in fact as recently as when I did my life playthrough on Twitch of my Resident Evil playthrough but the remake the very first thing I looked at cuz I had the to tighten our TX cards both of these cards with their air cooler still on there in my system and started playing and checking for multi GPU support and not only did it not support it something happened to where it actually reduced the the main clock all the way down to its base clock when I was trying to run the game and so the the first clock or the first gpgpu zero did not boost up to where it should have when SLI was enabled as soon as I wouldn't Nvidia control panel disabled SLI then we got the first card to boost all the way up to where even at 34 40 by 1440 100 megahertz panel was getting like a hundred FPS with a single card hundred Hertz there we go at the fast panel one hundred Hertz panel at we don't need a hundred thousand frames per second whatever it is but yeah that but the fact that the first card was jumped by the second card with SLI going that's all about profile and driver profile and all that we used n V inspector to go in there and try and even brute force some stuff same thing as battlefield 5 so we saw that there was even zero scaling whatsoever although they've got this fancy NB link on top of the Nvidia cards and PCI Express 4.0 in fact the funny thing about PCI Express 4.0 when it comes to AMD is when we talked about the NV link bridge that exists on Nvidia they basically said in their exact words where we don't need a bridge we've got PCIe 4.0 so we've got way more throughput through the PCI Express Lanes to handle multi GPU support than needing anything with fingers and then the irony is they don't support it at all anyway so one of the things that people tend to usually do is buy two mid-range cards SLI or crossfire them together and get and usually exceed the performance of the top two your card and that's not the case here the 2060 super which is kind of like the equivalent to the 5700 XT in terms of pricing neither one of those support multi-gpu anyway so I guess the whole point of this video is multi-gpu for all intents and purposes with the exception of bragging rights and synthetic benchmarks for like 3d mark is dead which is kind of a sad day for me and I think Phil should cue the sad piano music now because it's true even on skunkworks where I've got 220 ATT is and I'm playing my games the second card does nothing in fact when I do livestream though it's kind of nice because the encoder that's built in the end deck encoder from Nvidia is really really efficient and it's really good it's got a very good bitrate control it's got very good image quality and nearly zero hit to the system and these when you have a second car handling your gaming on the primary card yeah so this is more of a PSA if you're thinking about buying two cards I wouldn't I would just save that money get the top two your card something like a twenty eighty I would I would love to recommend something in the top tier range for AMD but we already know the Radeon seven is definitely a flop compared to the 5700 XT which is beating it in many benchmarks without even overclocking it if you're going from the top tier I need to have the best of the best you're gonna shop at like a two twenty eighty or twenty atti or a super card and then you could SLI those together but like I just said if you're looking for practical performance you're not gonna get it with SLI take that money put it into a better motherboard better CPU more RAM just you could upgrade the entire tier of nearly every component in your system by dropping the second graphics card if you're thinking about doing that but it's but yeah I've had a lot of people reach out to me asking me about multi-gpu and SLI is it still worth it and the answer is truly no and it's something that I've held out and to the bitter end on admitting that it is completely unnecessary and impractical and here we are J is two cents which should be J's two graphics cards admitting it's dead