Windows 10 Nvidia to end mainstream support for 3-4 SLI systems

[kemical]

The release of the new Pascal based cards will see the end of mainstream support for 3 or 4 way SLI. Nvidia will still include profiles for benchmarking using more than two cards but that will be about it:

"With the GeForce 10-series we’re investing heavily in 2-way SLI with our new High Bandwidth bridge (which doubles the SLI bandwidth for faster, smoother gaming at ultra-high resolutions and refresh rates) and NVIDIA Game Ready Driver SLI profiles. To ensure the best possible gaming experience on our GeForce 10-series GPUs, we’re focusing our efforts on 2-way SLI only and will continue to include 2-way SLI profiles in our Game Ready Drivers.

DX12 and NVIDIA VR Works SLI technology also allows developers to directly implement and control multi-GPU support within their games. If a developer chooses to use these technologies then their game will not need SLI profiles. Some developers may also decide to support more than 2 GPUs in their games. We continue to work with all developers creating games and VR applications that take advantage of 2 or more GPUs to make sure they’ll work great on GeForce 10-series GPUs. For our overclocking community, our Game Ready Drivers will also include SLI profiles for 3- and 4-way configurations for specific OC applications only, including Fire Strike, Unigine and Catzilla.,"
Nvidia drops 3 and 4-way SLI mode starting with GeForce 1000 series

 

[kemical]

The above might not be the actual end of the story. Microsoft have stepped in and have made changes to DX12 so that it's easier to implement:

''The cunning plan is to tart it up with a new abstraction layer that will help developers implement support without heavy coding.''

Although still unavailable the toolset will be released soon:

Most DirectX 12 games do not support Multi-GPU configurations because it requires a shedload of programming. Some games where it was done well have shown that DirectX 12 can handle multiple GPUs. They even managed to connect non-matching GPUs like the R9 Fury X and the GTX 980Ti to be used together.

According to Link Removedthe new abstraction layer is not available yet but Microsoft does state that they will be making a public release of this new toolset soon.

Reference