Is picking up a second 1080 for SLI worth it?

I'd like to gain a stable frame rate of 144 when playing games such as BF1 and other graphically demanding games. Would SLI help me accomplish this? I play on a 1440p monitor, btw.

You'd be better off selling your current 1080 and buying 1080Ti which almost matches 2x 1080s.

@PredatorRules: really? It's that much more powerful?

Yup, it also saves you another PCIe slot, PSU usage, makes less heat, prevent SLI issues.

I see no reason what so ever in doing SLI these days unless you're into VR or 4K graphics etc.

For 2K gaming it's 25% boost of 1080Ti vs 1080 and 35% boost with 1080SLI vs 1080, the 10% difference isn't much IMO and it's not worth the problems of SLI such as waiting up to a month of driver / game fix to support it (if at all).

@Kjranu: Whenever you're considering going SLI, it's best to look into SLI support for the specific games you're going to be playing.

SLI can improve performance over a single card anywhere from 0% in unsupported games, to like 95% in well optimized games. This is assuming of course your CPU is a beast, and not bottlenecking two cards.

I typically only run SLI once I can get a second card 1 or 2 years later for cheap.

@appariti0n: my CPU is a 6700k using liquid cooling. I don't want to overclock it too much, so I just OC it to 3.4 it 3.5 GHz. It's certainly not much if a bottleneck if at all.

You're right, and I should look into supported games first before making a decision. In any case, I'm content enough to wait until 2018 for Volta cards than upgrading to Ti if SLI turns out not to be enough.

titan xp

Actually, 2x1070 will still beat a single 1080Ti in any game with a proper SLI support. But I'd still get a single Ti over an SLI setup even if that SLi setup was much more powerful.

i say sell the 1080 and get the Ti.

I have sli and it scales really good in every game that I play i have no complaints except GTA 4 lol

No it's not:

Another example:

Now you don't need an excuse to own 1070SLI =)

@PredatorRules Well that's strange. According to guru3d 1070 is almost identical in performance vs 980 Ti. Here And look at these benchmarks against 980 Ti SLI vs 1080 Ti.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNnSwozq6z0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb4nYvWllyg

So yeah. Very strange. Is the SLI support just absolute garbage on Pascal? Specs wise 2x1070 should be roughly equivalent or even slightly outperform a single 1080 Ti.

@GiantAssPanda: Drivers change things and most importantly more efficient architecture? maybe Pascal is more efficient and advanced than Maxwell

A 1080 is a great card on its own, but as soon as you bring SLI into the mix, it is not worth it. You are better off getting a 1080 Ti if you need more performance.

@PredatorRules: I'm not disagreeing with you necessarily, I would prefer a single 1080 ti over two cards as well, just to not deal with the headaches SLI brings with some games.

However I would suggest reading a bit closer into the entire article, paying special attention to the scenarios where two 1070's absolutely decimate a single 1080 card. Namely in games that aren't too CPU heavy, and at 4K resolution, or close to it.

Ashes of the singularity is probably the worst game to benchmark traditional SLI, as it's insanely CPU heavy, and directly competes with the SLI overhead on the cpu. GTA V or Watchdogs 2 would probably be a close second.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_1070_2_way_sli_review,27.html

Also, this article is from mid last year, so I'm not sure how relevant the numbers are going to be, now that Nvidia has had ample time for driver updates improving SLI performance (hopefully).

@appariti0n: Ashes of Singularity is probably the worst game to benchmark SLI? try non support SLI games :P at 2017 I still see many sadly.

About article being mid last year, well I couldn't find direct 1070SLI vs 1080Ti bench so I did try to bring it as close as I could with the same reviewing site.

@PredatorRules: Well yes, you've got me there. Unsupported game would be worse to benchmark :P

I'm just saying mileage really varies depending on what games you play. This is another reason why I typically only run SLI once I can get the second card used cheaply a few years later. There's ample time for driver updates and patches to improve support.

One other thing to consider is that SLI does not double your vram. 2 x 8GB does not equal 16GB of vram. You still end up with 8GB of vram for the frames which are split across the GPUs.

As others have said, if you have the option for a 1080Ti rather than 1080 SLI, go for the single card every time :)

@fib112: True, unless dx12 multi-gpu really takes off. I'd rather see Vulkan get widespread adoption over anything else though.

DX12 mGPU is a pipe dream at this point. Most developers can't even get DX12 working properly. Supporting mGPU requires more effort and budget directly from the developers. This is not going to be a common thing.

@GarGx1: In this case how about a cheap 2nd video card to handle physics tasks, so to ensure that the 1080 is doing everything it can to run games and not be dragged down by other but intensive tasks?

If it's for PhysX tasks only you don't need SLI or even the same video card, just as long as it's Nvidia then pretty much anything will do.

This link will help a bit.

A single 1080Ti would not beat two SLI 1080s.

In games that do not support SLI or have shitty scaling, it will. There are a lot these days. You can also avoid all the SLI related BS with a single 1080 Ti.

Is it 6700 or 6700K? If it's 6700K then why are you running it such a low frequency? It can most definitely do 4.2GHz out of the box if you just left it alone. You would definitely be surprised with fps gains you'll get just from that.

I get 100+ fps in BF1 @ 1440p with 6700K and GTX 1080 (Ultra).

@insane_metalist:

I made a typo. Change 3 to 4. I overclock it to 4.5 and runs well.

@BassMan: True that.