Does SLI mean double the VRAM?

[Kraggy]

NVM!

 

Typical, only minutes after posting my question I read a note in Nvidia's FAQ which told me, no, VRAM on SLI-ed cards don't stack.

 

/sigh

[bben46]

Unfortunately, Beth games don't play very well with SLI. Hopefully the new games will be able to take advantage of multiple cards.

[Mohamed2001]

Unfortunately, Beth games don't play very well with SLI. Hopefully the new games will be able to take advantage of multiple cards.

 

For General gaming, though, would you take 3x GTX 980s, or 1x Titan? (Just Titan, not the super Titans (Titan Z & Titan X))

 

Or another comparison, 2x GTX 580 or 1x GTX 970?

[Doryani]

More cards usually mean more trouble. Heat, stuttering, optimization, stability.

 

Currently VRAM doesn't stack but it will in the future, after DX12 launches.

[Vagrant0]

 

Unfortunately, Beth games don't play very well with SLI. Hopefully the new games will be able to take advantage of multiple cards.

 

For General gaming, though, would you take 3x GTX 980s, or 1x Titan? (Just Titan, not the super Titans (Titan Z & Titan X))

 

Or another comparison, 2x GTX 580 or 1x GTX 970?

 

Most games, in general, don't work well with SLI. There just hasn't been much push within the industry since only about 5% or less even use more than 1 card. When it works, it can give you better performance for things like processing and rendering, but still (and probably will continue to in most cases) won't give more VRAM. Currently, the way VRAM works in SLI is that it is just mirroring the data between the two cards so that once loaded it can be accessed quicker. For things like shader heavy implementations, this can improve performance (when SLI is even working), but in the majority of cases it only leads to a slight (5-10) framerate improvement. As it currently stands, unless you are specifically trying to build for a game that makes use of SLI and which is framrate dependent, you are usually best off with a single card.

 

That said, despite its price point, I would not suggest going with the 970. This card has design flaws related to how it handles its partitioned memory... where it is technically a 3.5gb + 0.5gb card instead of a 4gb card. In most cases, this only becomes an issue when you're trying to load more than 3.5gb worth of graphics data on the card, but if it is a game with a large number of post-processing effects or where you are using enb patches, it will cause stability issues.

[obobski]

NVM!

 

Typical, only minutes after posting my question I read a note in Nvidia's FAQ which told me, no, VRAM on SLI-ed cards don't stack.

 

/sigh

 

No - neither SLI nor CrossFire "stacks" VRAM. So 2x4GB of 4x4GB or whatever will still only provide 4GB of VRAM for the application. Historically, 3DLabs' multi-GPU solutions could combine VRAM across multiple GPUs into a larger frame-buffer, however those aren't gaming cards, and also relied on an additional load-balancing processor to accomplish this feat (the GPUs were also all piped into all of the memory, which SLI/CrossFire does not implement).

 

 

 

Unfortunately, Beth games don't play very well with SLI. Hopefully the new games will be able to take advantage of multiple cards.

 

For General gaming, though, would you take 3x GTX 980s, or 1x Titan? (Just Titan, not the super Titans (Titan Z & Titan X))

 

Or another comparison, 2x GTX 580 or 1x GTX 970?

 

 

 

3 GTX 980s, or 1 GTX 970. No question. The 980 will be generally faster than Titan (unless we're talking FP64 GPGPU), and three of them would be significantly faster. I'd take 3 980s over "super Titan" as well. Same goes for 580:970.