A user opens his gaming PC and finds a strange port on his Nvidia GTX 1070. What is the port for? Later, he realizes: The function isn’t really useful today.
If you want to play more or less demanding games, you need a graphics card in your computer. AMD and Nvidia are the biggest manufacturers of such GPUs, but Intel also makes them now.
Depending on the manufacturer, special technology is used. A user has now discovered a special feature on his graphics card, without really knowing what it is.
The strange port is called SLI and connects multiple graphics cards
What is it about? A gamer opened his computer and made a strange discovery on his graphics card. It is located above the GTX 1070, which can be seen in the picture.
He asks the community on reddit what these strange ports could be (via reddit.com). Because modern graphics cards, such as a GeForce RTX 4080 or a Radeon RX 7900 XT, no longer have such ports.
What kind of port is that? The strange port is SLI. It stands for Scalable Link Interface and is a technology from Nvidia to connect two graphics cards together. For this, the graphics cards are connected with a cable, known as a bridge.
In theory, you can use the performance of two GPUs at the same time. By the way, at AMD, this technology is called Crossfire.
You can’t really use SLI on new graphics cards anymore
Is SLI still used? For newer graphics cards, Nvidia has discontinued SLI support (via GameStar.de). New games are no longer supported, and graphics cards from the RTX 3000 series are said to be fast enough, which is why Nvidia also removed support here. Theoretically, developers can still implement SLI natively into their games.
SLI. Used for connecting GPUs. It was already a dead technology when your GPU was released.
(via reddit.com)
With newer graphics cards, Nvidia now relies on NVLink, which is mainly used in high-performance systems where, for example, artificial intelligence has to process large amounts of data. In gaming, the technology never played a significant role. Data is now transmitted via the PCIe port and not through an additional port anymore.
What was the problem with the technology? With SLI and AMD’s Crossfire, Alternate Frame Rendering is used. The graphics cards alternate rendering the individual frames. However, this led to the problem that the second image/frame took significantly longer.
This suddenly caused micro-stutters in the game, resulting in a choppy image. It was often simply cheaper to go directly for a fast graphics card rather than to connect two weak GPUs together. So someone writes on reddit:
I still have it [the port] on my 1080ti. I never understood spending 300 British pounds for a single card and then another 300 British pounds for the same card for only a 60% boost.
Other gamers also have surprising features on their graphics card. One gamer played for years with the wrong settings because he hadn’t looked closely at his GPU. You can see the whole story on MeinMMO:
Gamer plays 3 years with wrong settings of his graphics card – a switch solves all problems
