NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti NVLink SLI Scaling Explored

Name: GeForce RTX 2080Ti
Brand: GeForce

by Shannon Robb — Tuesday, October 23, 2018, 01:52 PM EDT

GeForce RTX 2080Ti NVLink SLI - Test Setup, Cryptography and Scientific Analysis

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on a ASUS Maximus X Formula motherboard powered by an Intel Core i7-8700K 6-core processor and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The BIOS was set with optimized defaults, but XMP was enabled to ensure optimal performance. The CPU was also liquid cooled to avoid any potential for CPU throttling during our tests. The OS used was Windows 10 x64 build 1803, fully updated as of this writing.

HotHardware's Test System

Intel Core i7 Powered

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-8700K
(3.7 - 4.7GHz, 6-Core)

ASUS Maximus X Formula
(Intel Z370 Chipset)

GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti

32GB Corsair DDR4-3200
Samsung SM961 512GB
Samsung 860 EVO 4TB
Integrated Audio & Network

Relevant Software:
Windows 10 Pro x64

NVIDIA Drivers: v411.70

Benchmarks Used:
SiSoft SANDRA GPGPU
3DMark "Fire Strike"
3DMark "Time Spy"
Middle-Earth: Shadow Of War
Rise Of The Tomb Raider
Tom Clancy Ghost Recon Wildlands
Strange Brigade
FarCry 5
Rainbow Six: Siege
Duex Ex: Mankind Divided
F1 2018

SiSoft SANDRA 2018

Scientific Analysis Benchmark

SANDRA's Scientific Analysis benchmark uses OpenCL (AMD) or CUDA (NVIDIA) and runs though an array of General Matrix Multiply (GEMM), N-Body Simulations (NBDY),and Fast Fournier Transformation operations and reports the overall speed in GFLOPs. An aggregate result is generated as well...

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has already proven itself to be a heck of a perfomer on its own, and pairing two cards together improves things dramatically. Performance scaled very well here in every test, with the GEMM test showing the largest increase. Performance in the GEMM test scaled by 105.04% on Turing with NVLink, whereas the Pascal-based 1080 Tis with HB SLI scaled by 97.92%.

SiSoft SANDRA 2018

Cryptography Benchmark

The SANDRA GPGPU Cryptography benchmark churns through an assortment of workloads and presents individual results for overall crypto bandwidth, AES256 encryption and decryption, and SHA2-256 hashing bandwidth.

Scaling was a bit different with SANDRA's Cryptography benchmark. Both cards scaled well with dual-GPUs, but the RTX 2080 Tis didn't scale quite as well across the board. Hashing bandwidth on the RTX 2080 Tis with NVLink scaled by 83.33% over a single GPU, for example, whereas the 1080 Tis scaled by 95.24%. This could be a CPU bottleneck, however, since the RTX 2080 Tis offer much higher overall performance and may be waiting around on the CPU to feed them data.