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 - Rainbow Six: Siege and F1 2018

Page 8: GeForce RTX 2080Ti NVLink SLI - Rainbow Six: Siege and F1 2018

Rainbow Six holds a special place in the hearts of many PC gamers, as it's one of only a handful of titles that have spanned decades with sequels being released and still garnering popularity. Unlike most FPS games which are run, gun and respawn. Rainbow Six Siege takes a different approach, requiring tactical precision and teamwork, rather than just rapid-fire twitch response.

Rainbow Six: Siege

DirectX 11 Benchmarks

Rainbow Six Siege

This time we see something that honestly was a bit surprising. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards actually lose performance, though that in itself is not much of a surprise as some games simply do not utilize multi-GPU very well. However, add to this the fact that the RTX cards in NVLink show a 21.34% scaling increase at 1440p and a 49.57% increase at 4K tells us that NVLink is a completely different animal entirely. Just for the sake of having all numbers accounted for, the 1080 Tis in HB SLI showed at 1440p a -2.79% result, and at 4K a -7.50% result.

F1 2018

DirectX 11

F1 2018 is our newest race title and the F1 series have gained almost a cult like following as they are simply amazing games for those who love open wheel racing sims. F1 2018 is a DX11 based game and therefore does not have some of the advantages you may see in DX12 titles such as ASYNC compute or the native multi GPU capability. This also does mean you dotn have to deal with some of the mess we have seen from some of the DX12 based titles to date as well, so it really is kind of a wash. The benchmark is run at a couple resolutions with the in game preset set to its maximum.

F1 2018

F1%202018%201440p%20FPS

What we see in F1 2018 is a bit of a mixed bag and observe what may be a CPU bottleneck for the RTX 2080 Ti cards at 1440p. Here RTX shows only a 19.61% increase, while the GeForce GTX 1080 Tis in HB SLI show a commanding 31.90% scaling increase over a single card.

Bump the resolution to 4K and the GeForce RTX cards jump to life, delivering a NVLink scaling result of 65.26% while the 1080 Tis in HB SLI drop a bit, likely finding their limit and only delivering a 22.86% scaling over our single GPU results.