Nvidia Ends SLI Driver Profiles for RTX 20 Series on Jan 1st

We would be one of the first to admit that dual graphics card set-ups have become more of a novelty than a feature over the last 10 years. That isn’t, incidentally, any criticism of any of you who do use SLI or Crossfire GPU design, but in terms of gaming potential, it’s hard to ignore the fact that, generally speaking, you’ve nearly always been better off spending the money on a newer and faster individual GPU than going down the 2nd model road.

If you did, however, need any proof that SLI is dying, in a report via Videocardz, Nvidia has confirmed that as of January 1st (2021), they will no longer be providing SLI profiles for their 20XX series of graphics cards.

Nvidia to End 20XX SLI Profiles

The news isn’t entirely surprising as only recently Nvidia confirmed that of their new graphics card releases, only the 3090 would support SLI. In other words, from the 3060 all the way up to the 3080, these will only be operational as single GPUs. In terms of the 20XX series, however, while Nvidia will no longer officially provide SLI profile updates for new gaming releases, what they have said is that they will work with any developers to allow its use, but ultimately, it must be natively provided from within the game itself.

“NVIDIA will no longer be adding new SLI driver profiles on RTX 20 Series and earlier GPUs starting on January 1st, 2021. Instead, we will focus efforts on supporting developers to implement SLI natively inside the games. We believe this will provide the best performance for SLI user.”

What Do We Think?

Reading between the lines, this is basically Nvidia saying ‘we don’t think SLI in gaming is important anymore, so if developers want to support it they’re welcome, but we’re not going to bother about it’.

While this might sound a rather harsh policy though, it’s probably rather sensible. Put simply SLI/Crossfire is practically dead in terms of what it can really offer gaming PC performance and, while some will stick hang around, as we noted above, things haven’t changed. Put simply, if you want better gaming performance around 9 times out of 10 you’re better off spending the money on a newer graphics card!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!