NVIDIA restricts Pascal 3-way and 4-way SLI to OC benchmarks

NVIDIA has clarified its stance about 3-way and 4-way SLI for the GeForce GTX 1080. The graphics chip designer is backing away from the idea of an "enthusiast key" and the next driver release will no longer require it to enable 3-way or 4-way SLI.

The company says it's investing more resources in 2-way SLI and discourages anyone to go beyond 2-way SLI. There will be limited driver support, NVIDIA says it will create 3-way and 4-way SLI profiles for a couple of benchmarks to accommodate the overclocking community. This will include Fire Strike, Unigine and Catzilla.

Here is the official NVIDIA statement given to PC Perspective on the subject:

With the GeForce 10-series we’re investing heavily in 2-way SLI with our new High Bandwidth bridge (which doubles the SLI bandwidth for faster, smoother gaming at ultra-high resolutions and refresh rates) and NVIDIA Game Ready Driver SLI profiles. To ensure the best possible gaming experience on our GeForce 10-series GPUs, we’re focusing our efforts on 2-way SLI only and will continue to include 2-way SLI profiles in our Game Ready Drivers.

DX12 and NVIDIA VR Works SLI technology also allows developers to directly implement and control multi-GPU support within their games. If a developer chooses to use these technologies then their game will not need SLI profiles. Some developers may also decide to support more than 2 GPUs in their games. We continue to work with all developers creating games and VR applications that take advantage of 2 or more GPUs to make sure they’ll work great on GeForce 10-series GPUs.

For our overclocking community, our Game Ready Drivers will also include SLI profiles for 3- and 4-way configurations for specific OC applications only, including Fire Strike, Unigine and Catzilla.

Via: PC Perspective