SLI abomination – Intel’s ARC A770 gets paired with an Nvidia Titan Xp for a 70% performance boost

ProjectPhysX showcases crazy “SLI” combo in FluidX3D with Intel and Nvidia GPUs

Multi-GPU may be dead within the gaming space, but unholy multi-GPU combos remain useful in productivity workloads. ProjectPhysX’s Dr. Moritz Lehmann has showcased a multi-GPU setup that pairs an Nvidia Titan Xp graphics card with an Intel ARC A770 16GB GPU. This hardware combo was used with FluidX3D under OpenCL to showcase the power of mixed multi-GPU setups to great effect.

Each graphics card was used to power half of FluidX3D’s simulation. Overall, this unorthodox hardware combination delivered a 70% performance boost over either GPU on its own. Both GPUs were said to deliver similar performance levels when used on their own.

Overall, the FluidX3D benchmark tool 73 minutes to simulate and 14 minutes to render. For a single GPU, simulation alone would take around two hours. While pairing non-matching GPUs is not recommended, this use case proves that it can be useful.

Honestly, multi-GPU results like these make me sad that SLI or Crossfire is no longer supported within the gaming space. Yes, enabling multi-GPU support is a challenge for game developers, especially now that we are in the era of temporal effects, but just imagine getting a 70% performance boost like this in games.

You can join the discussion on this crazy Intel ARC A770/Nvidia Titan Xp multi-GPU combo on the OC3D Forums.