Final Words
NVIDIA always does this. We got Quad SLI with the 7950 GX2, only to be replaced shortly thereafter by G80, and now we're getting 3-way SLI with the 8800 GTX/Ultra, which we all know is on the way to being replaced by G92. Investing in a 3-way SLI setup today would be a terrible idea, you're buying into old technology and you're buying it after it's already been made obsolete by a new GPU. It's only a matter of time before G92 makes its way up the food chain, and three of those bad boys with even more shader power should give us a much cooler running, and faster, 3-way SLI setup than what we've tested here today.
The setup works, we didn't run into any software issues, and we can't deny that there are some definite performance improvements in certain games. The problem is that 3-way SLI just doesn't scale well enough, in nearly enough titles to justify the price.
We'd love to say that 3-way SLI is exactly what you need to play Crysis, because at least that way there'd be a configuration in existence that would run that game well, but we just can't. The game currently doesn't scale well at all from two to three cards.
And that's the fundamental problem with 3-way SLI, it's a better effort than Quad SLI was, but it's doomed from the start: it's built on old technology. We'd much rather have a couple of faster G92 based GPUs than SLI-ing three 1.5 year old GPUs together.
Then there's the bigger issue of SLI and CrossFire technologies in general, scaling is a little too dependent on software. You're increasing the execution resources of a standard 2-card SLI setup by 50%, but the performance impact is no where near that. Whereas if you added 50% more SPs to those two 8800 Ultras you'd see a much more tangible outcome. It's an extreme version of the way Intel makes quad-core CPUs, but instead of sticking two die on a single package, you have two die spread over two cards - that's hardly efficient. GPU architectures have changed dramatically over the past few years, yet we're still left with the same old multi-GPU technology. It's time for a change.
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