Nvidia’s latest flagship GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, is now available worldwide, With the launch of this new card, Nvidia are sharing a lot of information, including the pricing of this card globally, as well as some information regarding SLI bridges- which is probably more pertinent for most people on this site.
“Enthusiast GeForce cards traditionally came with 2 SLI interfaces per card,” Nvidia says. “Those were required for 3- and 4-way SLI operation. Beginning with NVIDIA Pascal GPUs, the two interfaces are now linked together to improve bandwidth between GPUs. This new dual-link SLI mode allows both SLI interfaces to be used in tandem to feed one Hi-res display or multiple displays for NVIDIA Surround.
“Dual-link SLI mode is supported with a new SLI Bridge called SLI HB. The bridge facilitates high-speed data transfer between GPUs, connecting both SLI interfaces, and is the best way to achieve full SLI clock speeds with GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs running in SLI (NOTE: The GeForce GTX 1080 is also compatible with legacy SLI bridges; however, the GPU will be limited to the maximum speed of the bridge being used).
“The GeForce GTX 1080’s new SLI subsystem provides more than double the bandwidth between GPUs compared to the SLI interface used on prior generation GeForce GTX GPUs. This is particularly important for high resolutions like 4K and 5K and surround.”
Nvidia also provided a simple table to ensure that users understand what bridge to use for their card, depending on the kind of use they are planning on putting their card to. You can check out this table below as well- it is the very first one that follows.
With this new card, Nvidia, and PC gaming, continue their inexorable march towards the highest possible end consumer grade graphics, and widen the chasm that separates consoles and PCs.
