Thanks for the clarification. I didn't understand most of what you said haha, my knowledge is clearly limited. But I actually watched an interview with Tom Petersen since I posted my initial thoughts, where he addressed NVLink in some detail, and my understanding is a bit better now I think. Here are some thoughts that I posted elsewhere, I think some of it relates to what you said:
I think there's a bit of confusion here, because "SLI" is going to remain the branding, but the actual NVLink interface is very different from traditional SLI. SLI HB only has 2 GB/s bandwidth, NVLink on GeForce has 100 GB/s. That is a massive difference that allows the two cards to cross-reference each other's memory and work as one a lot more efficiently. Conversely, SLI uses tricks like AFR to render independently on the cards, then uses the link as a pass-thru to the monitor output. Further communication is carried out over PCIe, which has much less bandwidth than NVLink after everything else, and is noisy and laggy.
I thought they would implement NVLink at the driver level and games would simply see the 2 cards as a single virtual graphics card, but it seems like they're not doing that yet. Instead, they'll focus on optimizing AFR and other legacy SLI implementations in the immediate future. But he did say that NVLink's features would be accessible thru the DX APIs, so we can expect developers to start taking advantage of the new platform soon. The new APIs should allow for easier adoption, so you can expect a lot more games to support scaling and better scaling. That's really the benefit, there are already games that scale at 80% with SLI, but some games scale a lot less, some don't scale at all, and some scale negatively. NVLink should fix that if implemented properly. You can expect higher scaling and much less variation in scaling across games. Seems like he hinted in the future they'll consider a more universal implementation, perhaps at the driver level, but bandwidth at the moment is not sufficient for that -- so maybe when the 300 GB/s NVLink trickles down to consumer GPUs.
That's what I posted on [H], may have made some wrong assumptions again, but it's what I got from the interview. It's all speculation at this point anyway, I hope we'll see some good initial results.
