Cant enable SLI with nvidia GPUs

Sleww · 2025-04-19 14:03:06

Trying to get SLI working on my 6.12.9-arch-1 with nvidia 470.256.02 driver. You may be wondering why these version and not latest 6.14.2 and 570.xx drivers, and based on what I read, 570 no longer supports 3d acceleration with sli, only enterprise applications/mosaic which isnt what I want, and 6.12.9 is the latest kernel I found that supports 470xx drivers. (please correct me if im wrong, ive made heavy use of AI to research information like this)

HW Info:
2xGTX 1070 (EVGA)
intel i7 8700k
ASUS Prime z370-A
32gb 3200Mhz gskill
2 Monitors (DP-2 & DP-4)

with that out of the way, the issue im having is when setting Option "sli" "Auto" in xorg.conf (same result with AFR and AA) I receive errors in xor.0.log saying "invalid sli option '<option>' using single gpu rendering". it seems the only options for this setting is off and Mosaic.
when chcecking nvidia-settings and grep for this option, it states that off and Mosaic are in fact the only valid options. this confuses me because the arch wiki shows (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA) these as valid options there. Am I missing something here? is setting sli=mosaic part of a series of settings in order to use sli for acceleration?

and to be clear- yes the nvidia drivers are instlaled and working properly and nvidia smi shows 470 drivers. I was able to play 3d games and received pretty stellar performance compared to windows.
and yes- this sli configuration does work on my windows install so this shouldnt be hardware related.

p.s. I am not using any desktop enviroment, trying to be as minimal as possible, only using xinit, xterm and twm

Thank you for any and all help!

tldr:
cant figure out how to enable sli on arch 6.12.9 with 2xGTX1070, instructions unclear, brain far too smooth.

Lone_Wolf · 2025-04-21 11:45:38

It's probably not a hardware issue but an artificial software limitation by nvidia ;

from https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Lin … E/sli.html

Hardware requirements
SLI functionality requires:
Identical PCI Express graphics cards
A supported motherboard
For the displays to be synchronized across GPUs, the GPUs must be connected using an SLI video bridge or nvlink bridge.
SLI Mosaic Mode requires NVIDIA Quadro GPUs. GeForce GPUs in SLI can use Base Mosaic.

Windows drivers may not have this limitation, but linux drivers have had it almost since sli was invented.

Sleww · 2025-04-21 18:37:51

Appreciate the reply, after continued research, I realized this was all a numbering mistake. 470xx drivers dont actually support SLI 'frame rendering' I.E. ADR/SFR/AA on consumer grade cards like my 1070s. however 450xx does.

this of course insuues other issues, need to downgrade to linux 6.1.1 and the nvidia installer needs an older GCC version, which is failing to build ffs, starting to question if its worth it LOL

cryptearth · 2025-04-21 20:54:23

Sleww wrote:

starting to question if its worth it LOL

depends on what you want to use it for
if for some application able to use multiple gpus on its own - no - let the application handle it
if for gaming: no for sure - even back with the mothership of two GTX 8800 and up to when nvidia and most games killed the support the benefit often would suffer from all those microstutter and sometimes even worse performance and pretty much always wasting twice the money for only a few percent at most
tldr: using multiple gpus only makes sense these days like when using one of those new nvid 50-series to play an old 32bit phys-X game - or with an amd/intel gpu - or if you need more screens than one gpu is able to handle even with dp-splitting like some simulator or such

Arch Linux

#1 2025-04-19 14:03:06

Cant enable SLI with nvidia GPUs

#2 2025-04-21 11:45:38

Re: Cant enable SLI with nvidia GPUs

#3 2025-04-21 18:37:51

Re: Cant enable SLI with nvidia GPUs

#4 2025-04-21 20:54:23

Re: Cant enable SLI with nvidia GPUs

Board footer