It feels like a million years since SLI was first brought to our attention, but even in its heyday, there were some serious drawbacks to running multiple graphics cards to boost game performance. Cost, stuttering, the fact that performance was not constant across all games, etc. Now that SLI has been put on life support, none of that matters, because starting January 1, 2020, Nvidia will stop adding new SLI profiles to the GeForce driver package ...and will no longer add new SLI profiles to the GeForce driver package.

Technically SLI is not dead, but if this were an episode of "The Walking Dead," it would be bitten by silicon-eating GPUs. SLI will live on for a bit if game developers decide to spend the effort to support this technology without the benefit of a specific SLI profile at the driver level. But those days are ending. [With the advent of low-level graphics APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan, game developers can now implement SLI support natively in the game itself instead of relying on SLI driver profiles Nvidia says, "Game developers can now implement SLI support within their own code by Nvidia states that "game developers can now leverage their expertise within their own code to get the best possible performance from multiple GPUs.

Nvidia sees this as a positive and says it will shift its own focus to supporting game developers who choose to pull in SLI as another vehicle, saying that this approach "provides the best performance for SLI users." A combination of driver-level tweaks and in-game optimizations will bring the best performance, but oh well.

The writing has long been on the wall. And with the release of the GeForce RTX 30 series, the writing is now in big, bold letters: the GeForce RTX 3080 and the upcoming GeForce RTX 3070 do not have the NVLink connector needed to connect and run multiple graphics cards in SLI The GeForce RTX 3090 does, but this card costs $1,499 for a single card; trying to run SLI on an Ampere card can cost as much as $3,000 for the GPU alone, leaving developers to keep their fingers crossed that SLI will continue to be supported. While the GPU alone will cost $3,000 to run SLI, developers are keeping their fingers crossed that SLI support will continue.

That said, some games do support SLI natively, including DirectX titles such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Civilization VI, Sniper Elite 4, Gears of War 4, Ashes of the Singularity, Escalation, Strange Brigade, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Zombie Army 4: Dead War, Hitman, and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Battlefield 1, and Halo Wars 2. As for Vulkan games, they include "Red Dead Redemption 2," "Quake 2 RTX," "Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation," "Strange Brigade," and "Zombie Army 4: Dead War.

In other words, SLI is not really dead. But it definitely has one foot in the grave.