https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.13-Yanks-VFIO-NVLink2
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Let us be honest here, the amount of people using SLI, which is what the NVlink is for, is very small both under Linux and Windows. For the vast majority of people, this will be a non-issue. Most games these days do not support, and nVidia themselves do not properly support, SLI anymore. So this “removal” really should come as no surprise.
NOTE: For those who do not know, SLI (Scalable Link Architecture) is where one “links” two video cards together to act as one card. This is the same as AMD’s Crossfire.
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I think it is quite a bit of a smaller user base than that unless I am misreading this. It seems like the driver in question is a VFIO driver. So this only impacts people using nvlink over vfio?
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I was looking at it based on the theme that it was yanked because of the lack of open-source but i understand what you are saying. SLI is toast as well as AMD crossfire. Long gone are the days of multiple graphics cards. Especially at the prices today! But also not necessary.
That is how I read it. There used to be a time when Quad and Tri SLI was quite common for a while in the “performance” crowd. Since the 10xx series, nVidia started to drop support for it. Cards these days are so powerful, and power hungry, that SLI, and by extension Crossfire, make no sense.
I can see that, but even features that used to be present in drivers in regards to SLI have been removed from the Windows drivers.
I have a pair of 1080’s in SLI. It works fine. That being said, I am not sure that the removal of vfio drivers will make much difference.
I thought they just stopped adding new SLI profiles. I believe SLI support for older cards is still present.
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Let me clarify, when I say drop support, I mean…
Sorry for my imprecise language. I forgot that the internet requires this. Yes, older cards still have SLI support, but without the profiles and games supporting it, SLI is becoming moot.
and its specifically NVlink 2.0, and its only because there isnt any actual open source way to test it along with it not being in major use by the broader community
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SLI and NVLink are different so it will make absolutely zero difference for SLI enabled systems. Pascal and older in the consumer space flat out do not support NVLink.
That said “it works fine” depends entirely on the game/use case. Youll get a few benchmarks and games that work well but most games will get minimal or negative scaling. Applications on the other hand that actually have support will likely have better tuning for it though
Frame pacing on multiple GPUs is just an absolute chore and getting good scaling takes a lot of work. SLI made some sense 20yrs ago when 3Dfx/Voodoo came up with it but these days it ends up being more trouble than its worth
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