If you want to create the fastest gaming PC in the world then you want to jam as many graphics cards as you can inside it, right? After all, if it’s good enough for Summit - the most powerful computer ever made, with its 27,648 Nvidia Volta GPUs, - then surely it’s good enough for your home gaming rig too.
But, outside of five figure PC builds for the spoilt rich kids of Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags there are very few multi-GPU PCs around. When the Steam Hardware Survey was still bothering to measure such things, the percentage of PC gamers using more than a single card was buried behind the decimal points of a big fat zero.
And if you want the best single GPU these are the around today.
So is there any life in the future of multi-GPU solutions or are both AMD's CrossFire and Nvidia's SLI relics of a long forgotten past? As ever, it’s a little bit from Box A and a little bit from Box B…
AMD’s CrossFire and Nvidia’s SLI are the bespoke technologies the two graphics card giants used to get their own GPUs playing nicely together in a single system. Originally both technologies demanded the use of a ribbon cable to connect the multiple graphics cards to each other, but while that is most assuredly still the case with Nvidia’s GeForce cards, AMD’s Radeon GPUs are now able to operate without such restrictions and communicate happily over the PCIe 3.0 interface.