NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti NVLink SLI Scaling Explored

GeForce RTX 2080Ti NVLink SLI - Far Cry 5 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Far Cry 5 is the latest chapter in a great series that has been popular for its visually impressive game engine. Far Cry 5 is a first person shooter built upon the Dunia engine which is a customized offshoot of CryEngine. In the 5th installment, you are a character looking to infiltrate and take down a religious militia and potentially domestic terrorist group in Hope County, Montana.

Far Cry 5
DirectX 11 Benchmarks

FC5
Far Cry 5

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FC5%202160p%20FPS%20DX11

At 1440p the GeForce GTX 1080Ti cards show a very minute gain in scaling, whereas the RTX cards sit flat. Pumping up to 4K and now the 1080Ti's ramp up to a 19.54% scaling over a single GPU alone which tells us that these cards were starved for work to do. This is further exemplified by the fact that the GeForce RTX cards suddenly come to life and deliver performance scaling of 31.58%. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
DirectX 12 Benchmarks
Deus Ex Mankind Divided is the follow-up to the previous installment Deus Ex Human Revolution. It is a a futuristic stealth action game from the team at Eidos Montreal. In this installment, you take the reigns of the newly upgraded protagonist Adam Jensen from the previous Human Revolution game. Deus Ex Mankind Divided supports both DX11 and DX12. We will test at a couple resolutions with the highest quality preset selected.

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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Deus Ex MD 1440p FPS

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In Deus Ex we see reasonable scaling, with 1440p numbers netting a RTX scaling of 23.75% over the 1080 Tis 18.71%. Turning up the wick a bit at 4K and the scaling moves to 21.35% for the 1080Ti card in HB SLI and the RTX leaps up to 54.81% performance over a single card. It's not 100% scaling but we do like to see when something can really make the cards work, providing at least a reasonable ROI in exchange for the cost of that second card in your rig. It is worth mentioning the Deus Ex is playable, with minimum frame rates touching above 70FPS at 1440p on a single GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for a solid gameplay experience. However, if you have a new high refresh rate, 4K or 4K HDR display, doubling them up might be a good choice, if you can foot the bill.

Dual GeForce GTX 1080 Tis are nothing to scoff at either as they can pull playable framerates at 1440p. Increase that resolution to 4K and they'll begin to sweat, however. This is where your rig will take a beating and even NVLink SLI RTX 2080 Ti's have a rough go with a minimum of 59.7, though that should mean there will be little to no stutters or visual hiccups in game. The same cannot be said for a single RTX 2080Ti and same for 1080Ti's as they slide right down the charts here, with the former at least posting 40FPS minimums.

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