Ultra, I wasn't capped in fallout 4 with 1080s in 2-way SLI @ 1440/144. Same with Witcher 3. By Ultra, I mean, I went into Nvidia Control Panel and cranked all that shit, DSR, AA, all that shit. Then cranked all the shit in game. I do remember being in the 100s in Witcher 3. 100-120 on average. I didn't really notice dips into the 90s much.

Yes, you'd probably need 1080 Ti SLI to sit at 144Hz in a lot of things with every box you can find clicked over to quality, and DSR. You'd actually probably have to tone things down just a little to hit a stable 144 even with SLI.

I'm also sure you could sit comfortably at 144Hz @ 1440p with 1 single 1080 Ti by turning down things that don't give much performance for how much load they induce. Turn down AA, turn down a few distance settings, turn off DSR, I'm sure 1 1080 Ti would be in the upper 100s consistently, probably bumping 144Hz, at 1440p. Just got deal with that intolerable aliasing and the grass detail distance being meh.

FWIW, the big thing I remember before I sent my 1080s back (EVGA Step Up, they were received in CA this morning) - I installed a bunch of texture mods just to see how well Fallout 4 would look. SLI, 1080s, 4.8GHz on my 3930K, all the bells and whistles cranked up.... I was touching 80fps. My GPUs were screaming. Top one was at 85C and throttling hard. I was just staring at a highly-textured tree and all sorts of amazing Ultra God Rays and my rig was melting. I just remember being kinda like "well, I guess this is it".

I'm sure I could optimize a lot of settings, but 2 1080s or 2 1080 Ti aren't exactly "unlocked God mode frame rates" in my experience. Far from it. I mean, for 1440p, it isn't overkill to the point that you can do whatever you want and hit 144Hz consistently.