RTX 4080 & RTX 4090: No SLI – NVLink removed  

The “death” of the feature has been confirmed 

The days when PC hardware enthusiasts had systems with multiple graphics cards connected by SLI bridges or later with NVLink technology seem to be a thing of the past.  

In particular, as many noticed in the first official photos, the brand new RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards from Nvidia , did not have the necessary port for NVLink connection with another same graphics card. Finally, the company has now come to confirm the speculation and the “death” of SLI/NVLink. 

Going into details, Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang spoke to various foreign media about the highly anticipated next-generation GPUs. In this context he was asked what happens to card linking in the new Ada Lovelace architecture and thus confirmed that the NVLink connection has been removed so that all the I/O capacity can be used for “something else”.  

In more detail, Jensen pointed out that the company’s engineers wanted to use as much space on the chip as possible for AI calculations and so they decided to make this sacrifice. 

Indeed, the new chips of the Ada Lovelace architecture are made in smaller nanometer technology, having “squeezed” more CUDA cores than ever before, more ROPs and many more transistors. At the same time we have new RT cores with technologies such as Opacity Micromap and Micro-Mesh Engines, but also the new Tensor cores with the FP8 Transformer Engine, for the next generation DLSS 3.0.