I've got a GTX 960 with 4GB, now I want to get another one to save some money instead of buying 1 Overkill GPU.
As I was reading, the GB of the GPU's does not multiply when using SLI, so I thought it might would be clever to get a 2GB version and save some more money. Yet I never heard about this Idea and how it works in the end. Would there be any issues? Would maybe the PC recognize the 2GB version as the primary GPU for some reason?
I don't think that would work, they either wont be compatible at all or the first card will only go up to 2GB. Would be interesting to see what others have to say, though.
EDIT: I'm 100% if this is true, but just my 0.02
Even if it worked, it would not make any sense to do so.
Because you will get limmited to 2GB effective usable vram then.
But it will not work.
I would suggest to sell your current card, and buy a single higherend one GTX970 / 980.
Or you could buy a second 4GB GTX960.
But with a single higherend card, you will get better frame times.
And you dont have to deal with all the Sli hicups like micro stutter and what not.
Also could you provide us some system specs?
since not all motherboards support sli.
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at best both cards would use 2gb of ram at worst it wouldn't work.
Nvidia has limmited the ability to sli 2 cards with diffrent amount of vram.
So it will not work.
You can only sli two 4GB GTX960´s or two 2GB GTX960´s.
You cannot mix them as far as i know.
Intel Core i5 4460
ASUS GeForce GTX 960 4GB
MSI Z97 Gaming 5 (don't judge me for a Gaming branded Mobo)
x2 4GB 1333MHz CL9 Corsair XMS3
Super Flower Leadex Platinum 750W
The most important stuff.
And I heard about SLI having a lot of issues but I also heard Linus say that the micro stutter and else SLI problems are minimal with the 900 GTX series.
I would not judge you for that gaming branded mobo.
Because the Msi Z97 Gaming 5 is a good board.
Like i said above, you can only Sli your 4GB card with another 4GB card.
So it depends a bit on what you can afford right now.
I´m personaly more a fan of a higherend single gpu solution,
because it will give you less headaces.
But if you are on a tight budget and you could only afford a second GTX960 4GB.
it might not be a bad investment.
just keep in mind that you might run into some hicups with some particular games.
DX11 won't but didn't i read somewhere that DX12 will support such a thing?
I dont think that DX12 will support VRAM stacking, at least with current generation GPUs. the memory bus isn't fast enough.
im going to quote someone from another website.
"VRAM will never stack on PCIe 3.0 - running out of VRAM on one card in DX12 will be exactly the same as running out of VRAM on one card in DX11 - swapping over the PCIe bus will happen
The short story:
RAM needs to be fast, the thing connecting the SLI cards together is not fast....The long story:
The VRAM on a GTX980 has a bandwidth of 224 GB/s
even with PCIE 3.0x16 (the fastest possible slot for a video card today) the RAM access speeds between card 1 GPU and card 2 RAM will be capped at 16GB/s - This is four times slower than an Nvidia 8800gtx from 2006 and 14 times slower than card 1 GPU accessing card 1 RAM.
The point behind these wild claims of DX12 stacking ram is to prove that DX12 is very flexible, and enables developers to do more things.... it will NOT make your SLI configuration act like a card with double the ram EVER
(p.s: the above applies unless NVlink is real life, but its not until Pascal and even then its only 60 GB/s with a claimed max of 192 GB/s, OK by todays standards but likley a bottleneck with cards in 2016/2017 with HBM and the likes)" -Cheddle from the LTT forum.