Nvidia has killed SLI as we know it – Transitions to “Native Game Integrations”

With the launch of their RTX 3090 graphics cards, Nvidia has confirmed that they have killed SLI as we knew it. For starters, Nvidia’s new Geforce 456.38 drivers lack support for “Implicit SLI” on Ampere graphics cards. Furthermore, Nvidia has also confirmed that they will not be adding their SLI driver profiles after January 1st 2021. 

Starting in 2021, Nvidia’s SLI driver profiles will go into maintenance mode. This change means that Nvidia’s SLI profiles will be tested and maintained for RTX 20 series and older graphics cards. SLI as we knew it is finished. 

Death to Implicit SLI, Long Live Explicit SLI

With older graphical APIs, multi-GPU support relied on driver profiles. This placed multi-GPU support on graphics card manufacturers, giving them the control that they needed to make multi-GPU work as intended within popular PC releases. This is what Nvidia calls Implicit SLI, and with the release of Ampere, this kind of SLI is finished. 

With new APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan, Multi-GPU support must be added by game developers on a game-by-game basis. Starting with Ampere, Nvidia plans to support developers and help them to implement  SLI natively within their DirectX 12 and Vulkan titles, as Nvidia believes that this will give their customers the best possible experience. That said, with Nvidia’s RTX 3090 being the only Ampere graphics card with SLI support, we’d doubt that any developers plan to spend their resources on such a minority of PC gamers. 

Currently, there are plenty of DirectX 12 titles which natively support SLI, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Civilization VI, Sniper Elite 4, Gears of War 4, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, Strange Brigade, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Zombie Army 4: Dead War, Hitman, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Battlefield 1, and Halo Wars 2. Nvidia hopes that this list will expand to cover many more titles in the future. With Vulkan, SLI is already natively supported in games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Quake 2 RTX, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, Strange Brigade, and Zombie Army 4: Dead War.