Geforce RTX 3090 in SLI – paired graphics cards for over SEK 30,000

As far as we know, the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus is the first to carry out a detailed test of an SLI configuration where two of Nvidia’s worsting cards in the new Geforce RTX 3000 series are paired with each other.

Nvidia recently announced that the company will stop supporting SLI in new drivers and that game makers themselves may incorporate support into their game titles. Currently, fourteen titles support multi-GPU solutions directly in their respective game engines.

In theory, not even an SLI or Nvlink bridge should be needed for certain configurations, but during the Gamers Nexus review, they encounter problems when trying to run tests without Nvlink. These attempts result in the games not activating support for multi-graphics cards.

With the test system well configured, however, two Geforce RTX 3090s in SLI offer, to put it mildly, impressive results in the few game titles that have built-in support. The biggest difference in the test is shown in Strange Brigade, where the scaling at best measured as much as 98 percent with the DirectX 12 interface.

The scaling is technically slightly worse in Vulkan, but the frame rate is all the higher, which means that it is one of the test’s more interesting results. From a single card reaching 188.3 FPS, two cards take the step to a result of 362.5 FPS. This means an increase of about 93 percent.

In the game that probably has the largest player base, Red Dead Redemption 2, the cards scale slightly worse but still give a 49 percent boost from 104 to 155.3 FPS when the game is run in 4K UHD resolution. Also in Quake II RTX, the configuration impresses as it enables over 60 FPS in 4K UHD resolution, which has not been possible before.

To add to basically all the tests in the video is that while the average frame rate often increases significantly, the lowest percentile does not see the same dramatic increase. However, Gamers Nexus adds that they did not experience any problems with uneven image delivery, so-called stuttering.

Do you lack the broad support for SLI or do you think it is good that Nvidia invests its developer resources in other things? And have you ever considered getting two Geforce RTX 3090s to drive in SLI?