Gadgetory

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 have you tried glass wire detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device use offer code Linus to get 25% off glass wire 2.0 at the link below 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 being the small business accounting software custom-built for how you want to work if you're a freelancer or a small business owner you need to check out fresh books it's the simple way to be more productive more organized and to get paid faster you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds you can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster and you don't have to take my word for it go try fresh books for 30 days for free at FreshBooks dot-com slash tech tips just enter Linus tech tips and how you heard about us sections so they'll know who sent you so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the envy link oh lordy that's awful Anthony come on to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also Envy linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts and our community forum which you should totally join she made me do it twice I mean it's really it's my fault I'll beat anything on the teleprompter