2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 SLI Benchmarks: 500FPS, 700W, & Limited Support

so this setup that you're seeing is what we had to do to get 3090s and sli functional this early in the game 3090 is an sli turns out not so simple to set up right now there's a number of various issues we ran into like the sli fingers on the cards not lining up it's not standardized so they're in slightly different places on different boards and not just vertically this time either but also horizontally on the board and also the limitations for sli these days are more strict than ever as nvidia has officially dropped sli support going forward and so now only things with explicit multi gpu support or mgpu support will actually run two cars and we had trouble running some of these games that don't technically require a bridge without a bridge we had the sli bridge in there in order to get it all working but it's there and we'll have some 30 90 sli benchmarks today for the highest performing possible gaming setup but one which is also not at all worth the money but we'll talk about that 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profiles as a first party and is putting all of that requirement onto the game developers if they want to support it which basically condemns it to death at this point if you like multi-gpu unfortunately but there's still functionality in vulkan and directx 12 games that have mgpu we'll read that list now it's pretty short so official support as stated by nvidia includes shadow of the tomb raider civ 6 sniper elite 4 gears of war 4 ashes strange brigade rise of the tomb raider zombie army hitman 1 deus ex battlefield 1 and halo wars 2. and then for vulcan it's red dead 2 quake 2 rtx ashes again strange brigade again and zombie army again now of course some of these games we've even heard of and so it's worth giving a shot at testing sli with these today we're going to be talking about the power consumption for the total system we'll talk about the two cards and the power consumption for that this is something that realistically you shouldn't be doing for gaming maybe it makes sense to get multiple 30 90s for some type of professional workload or for tile-based rendering but a lot of those instances you don't need a bridge like if you're doing tile-based rendering in blender a bridge doesn't help you they both render their own tile discreetly there's no interaction between the gpus that's worth speaking of there's no afr or anything like that so typically with with sli you'd be dealing with afr and you don't necessarily want to send stuff through the pcie bus but over time nvidia and amd both have moved more towards trying to leverage mgpu explicit multi-gpu communication through pcie it's just been really slow to pick up and over time it's actually enough decaying in adoption rather than increasing uh all right so we need to walk through the setup because it's absolutely insane and then we'll go through gaming numbers and through some power discussion as well so the ridiculous setup that we did for this is right here basically i have to get two test benches together next to each other because the sli fingers on the founder's edition card and the evga card are actually in different spots so if we move my memory fan here you'll see that on the board this is positioned much further towards the slot on the evga card than it is on the fe which means that it is not possible without risers to put these to an sli so at least on like these two cards you'll need like for like i think asus and msi might move them around a little bit too so really frustrating that that's not standardized but my solution was to run pcie risers so there's a riser in each slot they're running to this test bench and then they're mounted in this test bench's vertical supports for the evga card this one though since i couldn't align it like that i shoved a piece of cardboard under it to support it and then just positioned it horizontally how i needed to and i've got a couple of things like these clamps in place to support the cards for memory cooling because there's memory on remember the back of the card as well that's a major problem for this i put this i think i don't know if it's a 2000 or 3000 rpm for this 3000 rpm knock to a server fan on top of the cards blowing down so that's feeding air into the 30 90 ftw 3 for the gpu so that's fine this gpu is plenty cool because it's got a hideously configured water cooling setup on it remove these fans to show you and then the fans are cooling the vrm and the memory and it's it's at this point basically below what stock would be so the card despite looking like this is performing better than stock which means that in a the purest sense of uh like for like comparisons this obviously is not one because we're boosting the gpu a little higher by having this water block on it but they're ultimately going to be restricted to the slowest of the two cards anyway and you're talking a couple percent differences so it doesn't matter so this water block i secured we'll show this in a separate probably rip j video or something but i secured it by taking a nut and bolt and running it through a heat killer water block except the problem is there's no official mounting for this and i didn't have anything to actually brace against the block so i took some pcie slot covers and i cut them with metal snips and then i drilled a hole into the slot holes to make a bigger space for the nut and bolt to go through and then this one down here is actually an nzxt manta pci or rear i o whatever cover so that's how it's secured to the gpu and then like i said three fans for cooling memory and the vrm so those are completely fine this is hideous and terrible and everything but it works perfectly so that's an upside and then for water cooling i just hooked it up to a 240 rad we have this kind of floating in the office now it's a complete loop and it can just be hooked into any device on a whim so uh it's got two id cooling reject pastel pink fans on it i think these are a couple thousand rpm so they're they're actually pretty good for this and then we have a small pump and res uh alpha coil radiator it's one of the thicker radiators so it's not complete overkill but the the reason this is set up the way it is is because i was having even more difficulty lining these two cards up with the fe cooler on the 30 90 fe and so in order to get them line up really well uh it was just easier to take the whole thing apart and do this instead believe it or not that was actually in fact easier to do so then we kind of position this one in here like that that blows air in between the two cards gets the back side of the memory gets the vrm on the right side and then we're good for cooling in terms of the rest of the configuration so test bench is on this bench platform risers run to this bench platform and they're butted against each other so it takes a lot of space just for this and then for the fans i've got them plugged into this fan controller because they were some of the the stuff over here was too far away to reach that bench and we turn it all on it's very loud and very annoying and that's the system running and everything works and the sli bridge this fan is so dangerous the slide bridge is right there so uh you can see again that the the link's not aligned and so i had to do all this stuff just to align it now this is pcie gen 3 but that didn't really matter in our testing previously however it is a riser between those two things i'd expect maybe one to three percent offset for performance versus if it were slotted so we're going to see bigger differences though offset by having a water cooler on it end of the day we're within a couple percentage points of what it would be in a real world to set up if you could even do such a setup okay and then if we open gpu z on the system we do have two different gpus so down here you can see there are two and i've got one showing on each feed so like for example this one is reading 30 degrees celsius or so this one's reading about 24 i think that's the water cooled one this does not show memory or vrm temperatures but those are both fine we checked it externally and they're not even close to tj maxx so everything's working and then uh if you go into control panel for nvidia so this over here the control panel and configure sli has the maximize sli performance option it does not have this without the bridge and then it's got both cards detected and then for mgpu games we actually had issues getting them to work without a bridge because it just it wouldn't run both cards i don't know if that's an nvidia thing or what but it works now with the bridge connected so before we get into the game benchmarking i'm gonna run port royal port oil definitely works with this this is the application jay is doing the rip gn series with so we're going to respond with a rip j this content is not meant to respond to him it's an sli benchmark but i figure we'll just go ahead and get one of these benchmarks in while we have it all set up and give jay uh give give jay something to do so that's the end of the port royal run uh 26 0257 i think jay's current score is like i don't know 14 500 or something so jay off to you i guess i'll probably respond with a single card anyway and do some more extreme overclocking with it but for now this is this is not even overclocked i've not touched precision haven't done anything we just plugged the cards in and ran them so this is like as i was about to say zero after overclock but you saw the bench so maybe not quite zero but i haven't done any actual uh effort on it so it's a pretty good starting point all right that's enough of that let's get into the gaming benchmarks we'll start with the one with the most exciting of the games but the least exciting as a game strange brigade is one of the better optimized games out there and also supports explicit multi gpu and it's also extremely popular with an average of 33 players at any point in all of august there are nearly as many players in strange brigade as linus has employees so we know that this game is well loved by gamers in the community starting with 4k and vulcan the rtx 3090 sli configuration ran 363 fps average with lows also scaling well we didn't have any micro stutter issues and measured 243 and 233 fps for the lows that's an improvement of 93 percent over the 30 90 fe stock card bearing in mind that we've also improved the cooling of the 30 90 fe and so we'll gain maybe one to three percent performance from those changes either way though north of 90 is good scaling and that's what has made sli so appealing for enthusiasts in the past but this game is an exception not the norm and nvidia's abandonment of sli profiles going forward only further reduces the chance of this being worthwhile ever at 1440p the chart scale had to be adjusted yet again sorry that these are even less legible than normally but having one item at 472 fps average blows out the scale this is versus a single rtx 3090 where the improvement is about 70 percent we started to become bound by other factors towards the top end of that scale but it's still better scaling than we've seen in a lot of games previously lows aren't improving proportionately to the average but we also aren't seeing micro stuttering or game breaking issues at 1080p it's clear that we're bottlenecked by the cpu we already mostly were but now it's evident in the very least this proves to us that this particular application has a lot more room for a single card bench marking we'll quickly look at dx12 for strange brigade as well at 4k we ran 319 fps average here so the frame rate is lower than with vulkan but the scaling is technically better with dx12 performance climbed by 98 over the single 30-90 fe stock car at 1440p frame rate was 390 fps average so that's a 41 uplift we're bouncing off the cpu limit again which we saw in 1080p testing but it's not worth showing another bottleneck strange brigade chart so let's move on to a game people have actually played red dead redemption 2 is next starting with vulcan for this one the rtx 3090 sli configuration had about 50 uplift at 155 fps average versus 104 fps average for a single card configuration we did not observe any micro stutter or other afr issues during our test passes the uplift isn't anywhere near what strange brigade was offering with its 98 uplift but it's something it's there is something there fifty percent for an extra fifteen hundred dollars though is hard to really care about especially considering nvidia is putting future sli support on game developers so it's basically doomed anyway at 1440p the 3090 sli configuration maxes out at 175 fps average just a 17 uplift over the single card we're becoming bound here we won't bother with 1080p for the same reasons as before because they were equal due to the bottlenecking and just as a notice sli for these cards does not work in red dead with directx 12. in this chart that's clear the cards are even and the sli config technically dropped a few frames occasionally from other potential issues in the test setup but we can't imagine what those might possibly be considering how sound the setup was hitman is apparently supported but hitman 2 does not seem to be supported the sli and non-sli performance was about the same so there's no scaling to speak of and we'll have to move along from this one and express our great disappointment in lengthy pros at another time that we can't play hitman 2 with sli for shadow of the tomb raider testing positioned the sli rtx 3090 is at 167 fps average with lows also getting uplifted from the second card improvement versus a single card was about 60 percent here and for future reference we've observed a cpu limitation of this game as becoming imposed around the 180 fps marker so there's still some room to scale on the cpu sli improvement is just limited overall for this title although it gets credit for at least being present it certainly isn't worth 1500 for a second card though at 1440p the scaling dies and performance stops increasing maybe this is the scenario where nvidia's fabled single card 8k gaming could actually be a reality except for the part where it takes two cards but this is starting to look like almost everything except 4k and higher would be limited by an sli 3090 setup to really no one's surprise it's just again the limited list of games and the lack of future official support from nvidia on sli makes it tough to justify for things outside of workstation applications quake 2 rtx is last this is on vulcan and is fully path traced making it an interesting title for determining performance scaling from the new rt cores but we talked about that in the review previously at 4k the frame rate ran 67 fps average an improvement of 70.5 percent over the rtx 3090 single card but with no improvement in the 0.1 lows this isn't as much scaling as we've seen elsewhere but it's still better than tomb raider and red dead we didn't visually see any severe micro stuttering but the lows are also not anywhere near where we'd like to see them for this title 1440p had the sli configuration at 137 fps average with 0.1 lows dipping below the single cart that's a 62 percent improvement over one card at 1440p finally at 1080p we saw a 216 fps average with lows below the single card level once again 216 has the sli configuration about 53 percent over the single card if you want to revive a competitive quake career but with rtx enabled this would help do it so for power consumption we didn't make new charts for this but we'll pop up one of the firmware charts from our 30 90 review and you can see single card power consumption here multi-card is just gonna scale linearly because this is only one card this number does not show total system power draw so you can just increase this uh exactly linearly multiply it for how many cards you have assuming all are under the same workload it will scale so if you have a 500 watt draw or a 400 watt drive it'll be a thousand or 800 watts for just the cards for total system power consumption just for fun we tested that system that now needs two test benches to run and total system was 360 watts idle and uh and uh it was 941 watts total system under a port royal load so that bench is not our competitive overclocking bench it's only uh only in air quotes here 10 700 k it's at 5.1 gigahertz that's fine for gpu reviews the reason we use a 107 is because we don't need it for other things but for competitive overclocking we use a 109kf or something like that so your power consumption may go up in a scenario like that but uh just shy of a thousand watts is quite a high power consumption and most of that's gpu because that was in a port royal workload so that's it for the test and obviously this was done because we could because it's interesting it's fun interesting to see how the stuff scales unfortunately multi gpu is all but dead at this point and there's a lot of appeal to it even nvidia and amd can see appeal because they sell more cards to the same people even if you're able to beat the higher end card with two lower end ones but uh the the support is just lacking and supporting games and drivers has been questionable at best a lot of times the best support has come through community-made profiles and then i mean it's not not a great system to have to rely on community for stuff like that so it was an interesting test but this is not a configuration we'd recommend obviously for gaming so you're limited to that list of games we read earlier and that's about it nvidia has the official list on its website if you're curious again a lot of these games if not all of them a good amount of them should work through the pcie slot we were having trouble getting that working for some reason not really sure why but with the bridge it did work and we were able to enable sli and run it in the games as expected so strange brigade 100 scaling is pretty pretty neat 98 with dx12 93 or so with vulcan but that's about the best we saw so that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more you can get a store.camerasaccess.net or patreon.com gamersnexus help us out directly and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 765,649

Rating: 4.8933773 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, RTX 3090 SLI benchmarks, rtx 3090 sli worth it, nvidia rtx 3090 sli, evga rtx 3090 ftw3, nvidia rtx 3090 founders edition, nvidia rtx 3090 review, nvidia rtx 3090 port royal, ripjay, ripgn, nvidia rtx 3090 2 way sli, sli benchmarks 2020, sli worth it, multi gpu worth it

Id: y4fb_R5Ogw0

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ImJacksLackOfBeetus]

This video is a gold mine.

$3000 worth of GPUs

"so I just shoved a piece of cardboard under here and took some metal snips to some PCIe slot covers ..."

or after running Port Royal

"... and this isn't even overclocked, this is like zero effort"

pans over to the eldritch horror look-alike test bench

[u/Sylanthra]

Finally, I can play Quake RTX at 4k 60 FPS. That is definitely worth $3000 just for the cards /s

[u/Jofzar_]

This might be my favourite video you have ever run Steve.

It's just so good.

The graph being semi unreadable because performance is too high,

The multiple jank solutions,

The ltt employee vs average players

The port royal smack down on jay.

[u/aksine12]

so basically it is up to game developers and implementation to allow scaling across multiple cards.

also that setup is so jank LOL, i love it. RIPJAY indeed.

[u/vikavish]

I too bought those sick pink fans from ID-Cooling.

How'd you rate their performance Steve?

[u/iDontSeedMyTorrents]

I'm surprised the position of the SLI connector isn't standardized. Has this ever been an issue with past cards?

[u/Ferrum-56]

I would have loved to see 8k benchmarks instead of 1080/1440p.

Because if you use a useless solution to solve a useless problem... maybe it'll become useful.

[u/SirAwesomeBalls]

It is a real shame that multi-GPU isn't more popular, there is so much potential there that just goes untapped, especially for multi-monitor gaming and games like MSFS 2020.

Even a 3090 will fall to it's knees trying to push 3 1440P ultra-wide monitors.

mGPU support in DX12 and Vulkan works great, but as we have seen many developers don't bother with it, and there is no way I have found to force it if the developer does not add support to the application.

Now that nVidia is dropping SLI in the driver, with no way to force something like SFR / Every other frame rendering, it is really going to suck for multi-monitor gamers as we can't build our own SLi profile. This move doesn't just kill Sli, it kills multi-monitor gaming as well.

The real irony in all this is that we are finally seeing PCI-E Gen4 and NV-Link on consumer cards which means we FINALLY have the bandwidth to run forced SFR/Every other frame without support in the application and without the stuttering and artifacts that we would get with the old bridges. Just as the hardware is catching up to the technology, they shit can it, and it is beyond frustrating.

This sucks.

[u/johnnygreencov]

It was only a matter of when...