[1] The initialism SLI was first used by 3dfx for Scan-Line Interleave, which was introduced to the consumer market in 1998 and used in the Voodoo2 line of video cards.

It is possible to run SLI without using the bridge connector on a pair of low-end to mid-range graphics cards (e.g., 7100GS or 6600GT) with Nvidia's Forceware drivers 80.XX or later.

However, if there are two high-end graphics cards installed and the SLI bridge is omitted, the performance will suffer severely, as the chipset does not have enough bandwidth.

The following table provides an overview on the maximum theoretical bandwidth for data transfers depending on bridge type specifications as found on the open market:[15] This analyzes the rendered image in order to split the workload equally between the two GPUs.

For example, in a scene where the top half of the frame is mostly empty sky, the dividing line will lower, balancing geometry workload between the two GPUs.

While AFR may produce higher overall framerates than SFR, it also exhibits the temporal artifact known as micro stuttering, which may affect frame rate perception.

[17] GeForce Boost allows the rendering power of an integrated graphics processor (IGP) and a discrete GPU to be combined in order to increase performance.

NVIDIA claims that twice the performance can be achieved with a Hybrid SLI capable IGP motherboard and a GeForce 8400 GS video card.

[25] In 2020 Nvidia announced that they would no longer be adding new SLI driver profiles on RTX 2000 series and older, from January 1 2021.

It was possible for game developers to use DirectX 12 or Vulkan to introduce a multi-GPU setup without an SLI or CrossFire connection, but few developers supported the feature & with the increased graphical performance of newer video cards, multi-GPU setups for gaming were rendered obsolete by the early 2020s.