The Nvidia RTX 2080’s NVLink is not SLI… it’s a “bigger, badder link”

The new Nvidia Turing GPUs are bringing with them a new form of multi-GPU bridge for gaming, called NVLink. It’s an interface with many times the bandwidth of the old-school SLI connection, but it’s also much more. At its most basic level the NVLink interconnect can be thought of as essentially the same as the old SLI connections on your graphics cards; you use a bridge to pair up two GPUs and they can then talk to each other and co-render games for increased performance. NVLink can still work that way, but only because Nvidia has made SLI work across the speedier bridge. Really it's just a stepping stone to a future where multi-GPU gaming is actually genuinely desirable and not just occasionally powerful but mostly frustrating, as it is right now. But just because it’s on a speedier bridge does not mean SLI games will be any faster across NVLink, however. “And the reason,” Nvidia’s technical marketing director, Tom Petersen told me recently, “is because if you're running at a resolution and a refresh rate that works over the old bridge, then that's already doing a very good job of offloading traffic from PCIe and putting it across the bridge.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2QBDkpi