Suggestion for the 1C Devs

[KG26_Alpha]

One word with GPU manufacturers and SLI & X-Fire.

Marketing

[Jaws2002]

When I got my gtx 590 there was no 3gb gtx580 and the 590 had a solid advantage over ALL other cards in a lot of games. While it only uses 1.5gb of video ram, it still runs a lot faster than a single card, in games that make sli work.
I still think they would be better off working on multi GPU support than spend months on the bloody dx9. But that's just me.
Anyway, recently I tried the sli profile I found in one of the technical threds and the performance boost I got was impressive. There are still some bad slow downs around the clouds, but everything else went from 15-20fps to 57-60 fps.
I think they would please more people fixing multi gpu support than fixing the bloody dx9, that's used by people that most likely don't have a powerful enough system for this game anyway.

[Stublerone]

They have to fix dx9. It is not, what they really want but they have to run conform on package specs.

Concerning sli: sure the optimized profiles show, that this helps improving the sli matter, bit again: the technique is old and normally (to fully make their initial intention of sli work) the whole components have to be harmonizes up to high standard. The communication between the pc components have to get high end bus systems in every case. This harmonized complete pc will reach market as soon as the manufacturers of every part work closely together ->perhaps this will never happen!
Other possibilty: A manufacturer built his own solution all-in-one. First steps can be seen in the implemented gpu in intel cpus.

In current technical configuration, sli is for high end benchmark community or simply for those to burn money to heat up the room or to use more electricity for nothing. Just my point of view.

[von Pilsner]

Good news for everyone but Warhound and Stublerone...

Originally Posted by Luthier

We haven’t made changes to our SLI and Quad SLI support in the upcoming patch.

More specifically about the SLI question.
SLI support is two-ways, it needs to be in our game and in NVidia drivers. We have it in our game, but the patch needs to be certified by NVidia and a change needs to be added on their end.
We probably will try to get the upcoming betapatch certified by NVidia and get SLI support for the game with the next driver release.

Official nVidia support for CloD may be just what we need...

[Stublerone]

Hopefully it helps you a lot. Those with older sli setups will nevertheless suffer of their low vram. Wush you good lucj!

[FS~Phat]

Originally Posted by Stublerone

They have to fix dx9. It is not, what they really want but they have to run conform on package specs.

Concerning sli: sure the optimized profiles show, that this helps improving the sli matter, bit again: the technique is old and normally (to fully make their initial intention of sli work) the whole components have to be harmonizes up to high standard. The communication between the pc components have to get high end bus systems in every case. This harmonized complete pc will reach market as soon as the manufacturers of every part work closely together ->perhaps this will never happen!
Other possibilty: A manufacturer built his own solution all-in-one. First steps can be seen in the implemented gpu in intel cpus.

In current technical configuration, sli is for high end benchmark community or simply for those to burn money to heat up the room or to use more electricity for nothing. Just my point of view.

Interesting opinion but my experience is not what you suggest.

I have many games in my library that absolutely work very well with SLI. Scaling for a lot of them is 60-80% (sometimes 100%) for the 2nd card and 50% or better for every additional card after. I have done testing with many games from single to 2way, 3way and 4way SLI and I have to say its not just about benchmarking. There is a real tangible difference. Sure its debatable whether there's any benefit than more than 120FPS but a lot of games are very graphically demanding these days with all feature turned on.

There are several very demanding games out there that can fully utilise all 4 of my cards at 99% and give me 100FPS or so when many others without this SLI struggle to get 30FPS.

COD currently does scale in SLI when at higher resolutions too. When I run it at 6048x1080 in surround with the 3 monitors it pushes all 4 cards properly to 99% and runs really smooth, although at a much lower frame rate of 25>40FPS compared to 40>80FPS at 1920x1080 with a single card.

I expect I will achieve 200FPS plus when the SLI profile is matched to the current game code. I was already achieving that a year ago when the game 1st came out with my old 4way 5870 crossfire setup. The only thing that created an issue for me back then was the limited Vram which is why I upgraded to 3GB video cards. And at 6048x1080 the game uses 2.5-2.8GB vram compared to 1.6-1.9GB vram at 1920x1080 with max settings. This is why many people experience stuttering and slowdowns because they just dont understand how much textures for the massive maps and large amount of objects that need to load. The development team appear to have been tweaking the textures and the texture engine for this very reason to make sure textures can fit in midrange hardware and are only loaded when needed and stream in and out of memory more smoothly. Its a big challenge for such big high detailed maps and detailed models with lots of objects.

In any case I am very excited about Luthiers news on trying to get the next official patch (or possibly next beta?) with an Nvidia SLI profile!

Couple videos... COD in ultra-widescreen and the beast.

IL2 COD 6030x1080 Nvidia 2D Surround - Hurri's vs BF110's

4way SLI GPUs all maxed at 99% avg 30FPS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbJfvrd553U

The beast that powers IL2 COD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mHCNW1lkk4

A year ago on my old 4way 5870 setup. 200FPS+
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=23604

[Stublerone]

You got it right, phat. I just wanted to warn everybody to hear on unexperienced sli fanboy friends, who never got to know about sli and say, that bf3 is the best graphics and most demanding game. If someone give advice to update a gtx 285 with an additional one, I have to say, that such a guy is not the right one to talk to.

First, get a single card, which run everything sufficiently and then start building your sli maschine. There is no doubt about some more performance, bit the load of your cards do not tell you 1:1 the performance increase. For 3 monitors you need for sure more graphics power, but first of all more vram. What I want to say: built up an sli with 2 x 580s with 1.5 gb each and max out to multi monitors, you will see the limitations in vram. You can add 2 more cards and will never solve the initial problem of vram texture loading.

2 x 680 in triple monitor resolution will not run as smooth as 2 ati hd7970. They simply do not have enough vram to handle all the load, which is instantly needed from the game. Every load from normal ram through the bus is too slow and you get stutters or whatever. For cod, even in normal 1080p resolution, a 1,5 gb card will cause some stutters. I maxed out everthing in this resolution and also have 2.5gb load, but my card can manage it.

Nevertheless, sli is helpful for multi monitors, but the efficiency of that technology is forcing me to say: It is damn expensive and the tech needs rework. The data buses for every component should be as fast as the bus between gpu and its vram. Efficiency of this can only increase, if this happens.