Hah, the Shield. Touche.
It actually annoys me that the general public still thinks all these 'last generation' issues are a part of SLI ( Can't speak for CF ). I still see people talking about micro stuttering and whatnot. Now, I've been through all the early and mid-generations dual-core GPU cards ranging from AMD's layercake cards to some of Nvidia's and a few real 2 Individual setups and it has always been terrible. The 5970 being hands down the worst card I've ever owned.
Don't ask me why I kept coming back, mostly an e-peen factor I think.
HOWEVER! After I got my 680 SLI setup, it's perfect. Not as in "Oh close to single-GPU feel" but completely perfect. There are simply no stutters, no massive SLI issues or anything of that nature. I don't sit around waiting for profiles or have to do a lot of tweaking to get anything working. Worse case scenario I've experienced is profiles that aren't 'perfect' which means reduced performance but it's still above the performance of just one card. I don't even disable SLI for older games as they usually work fine because they simply don't utilize it instead of spassing out as before.
Hurts me more than anything when someone says "Oh think I'll stay away from SLI because of the micro-stuttering, my <insert 5 year old cards> had some problems".
Let's shoot down the misconceptions!
I'm genuinely really happy for you that you haven't had any issues. Seriously. The thing about anecdotes though, is that they are anecdotal, and there's all sorts of other ones out there.
In this generation of video cards, I've personally used 1x7970, 2x7970, 1x690, 3x670, 2x670, RoG Matrix 7970. Also have done two 560Tis, a 580 LX, two 5870s, 6870, and continue on back to the Voodoo 3 and earlier.
The microstutter still exists. SLI problems still exist. SLI profiles aren't always added in a timely manner, and the custom profiles don't always work. I'm not really sensitive to microstutter and honestly don't care in the least about it as I primarilly play competitive games. I never fuss with downsampling, getting the right kind/amount of AA. I just want 8.3ms frametimes, hopefully consistently.
When my 690 is getting worse performance in a game than a friend's 680, that's annoying. When a new competitive game, or a game in beta, is running like complete garbage on 3x670s, that's unacceptable. It still happens. It has happened to me as recently as two weeks ago in Warframe. The 690 should theoretically be less sensitive to this issue because it actually has a chip on it to do the frame matching that standard cards like 680s use hardware level code to achieve. There's still hiccups.
If getting two high end cards is the only way that you can get the performance you are aiming to reach for, SLI continues to be a very good option. But, saying SLI is now fixed and it is a great option, then you start to encourage people to do stupid things like get two 660s or 660Tis to try and game performance:$ to match a higher end card, which will bite them in the ass if they truly understand performance.
In my circle of folks, that 1 frame of input lag also tends to hurt their performance. I wasn't quite convinced of it at all, because it's not something I've been able to pick up on. I watched
Kudochop use my rig in a match of T:A at a LAN I hosted recently, and he was missing headshots that would otherwise be a piece of cake. So for people who are sensitive to that, there's also that issue to contend with.
Almost always there's a profile ready at a game's launch, and if there's any kind of issue we fix it ASAP and release the profile via NVIDIA Update or GeForce Experience.
