Can I say, one of the things I'm genuinely excited about is NVLink. It enables a 100 GB/s two-way interconnect between the cards, which is 50x higher than SLI. This allows the cards to use a shared memory buffer, which means they can be treated as a single graphics card by the driver. We should in theory see almost perfect scaling in every game, however, NVLink still has a fraction of the local GDDR6 bus bandwidth (616 GB/s for the 2080 Ti) and 1/3rd the bandwidth of the commercial Quadro NVLink (300 GB/s). But it should still offer significant scaling and more importantly, uniform scaling across games that use similar amounts of memory.
I think this may make NVLink a decent upgrade path option. Imagine for the sake of argument that Maxwell had NVLink. Let's say you bought a 980 Ti in the summer of 2015. When the 10-series cards came out, you still had the performance of a 1070, so you decided to skip that generation. Now the 20-series are coming out and your 980 Ti is getting old. Rather than dishing out $700 for a 2080 or $1200 for a 2080 Ti, you can just spend $250 on another 980 Ti and with 85% scaling you have the performance of a 1080 Ti, so you're good for another generation. Clearly we don't have the numbers yet, but if it scales 80-90% in everything, I think that will bring dual-GPU setups back from the dead, and may make MicroATX more of a thing in SFF.
I think this may make NVLink a decent upgrade path option. Imagine for the sake of argument that Maxwell had NVLink. Let's say you bought a 980 Ti in the summer of 2015. When the 10-series cards came out, you still had the performance of a 1070, so you decided to skip that generation. Now the 20-series are coming out and your 980 Ti is getting old. Rather than dishing out $700 for a 2080 or $1200 for a 2080 Ti, you can just spend $250 on another 980 Ti and with 85% scaling you have the performance of a 1080 Ti, so you're good for another generation. Clearly we don't have the numbers yet, but if it scales 80-90% in everything, I think that will bring dual-GPU setups back from the dead, and may make MicroATX more of a thing in SFF.
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