18 PCWorld OCTOBER 2020NEWS RYZEN ZEN 3 LAUNCH DATE
NVLink, the proprietary connector that
enables SLI multi-GPU configurations. Even
the $800 GeForce RTX 3080 lacks it, and
Nvidia calls that graphics card the 30-series
flagship. (The RTX 3090 is a “BFGPU” [go.
pcworld.com/bfgp] above and beyond the
rest.) Given that Nvidia controls 80 percent of
the graphics card market (go.pcworld.
com/80pc), it seems clear that the days of
slapping multiple graphics cards into your PC
to boost frame rates is effectively over.
That said, it’s been effectively over for a
while. Nvidia reduced SLI support to just two
graphics cards (go.pcworld.com/slis) during
the GTX 10-series generation four long years
ago. Rival AMD phased out CrossFire multi-
GPU support for its Radeon GPUs (go.
pcworld.com/xfre) soon after. But eventhat reduced support has stuttered in recent
years, as graphics cards became powerful
enough to drive 1440p and 4K displays by
their lonesome.
Making matters worse, multi-GPU support
has become increasingly wonky in games
themselves over the years. Such setups were
always a niche consisting of deep-pocketed
enthusiasts, making it hard for developers to
justify supporting SLI. SLI also slowly lost its
reason for being, first because many games
tied physics to frame rates, and inevitably
because of the rise of ultra-powerful GPUs.
Even if you invested in an SLI setup, it flat-out
wouldn’t work in many of today’s games. In
the ones that did support it, it didn’t work
well—technically implementing it was always
a nightmare for devs. Game developers can
use DirectX 12
to implement
multi-GPU (go.
pcworld.com/
dr12) without a
connector, but
it’s telling that
virtually none of
them have.
We’ve
warned
would-be
buyers off
multi-GPU
configurations
Nvidia controls 80 percent of the graphics card market. for years now.