@B6: How far down the road is official SLI support?

[von Pilsner]

Originally Posted by Stublerone

I just say to everyone asking me: Warning! Shit idea with sli!!!Warning!!!

Just waste of time, resources, performance, money...even for triple monitoring.

As long as sli isn't working 100% which is technically not possible atm, better drive with a good single gpu. No advantage from memory, no advantage elsewhere!
Only for guys, who want to waste time in finding solutions to play instead of just playing. Please never upgrade your system with sli with the intention to safe money. It is simply a bad idea. The nerd guys with sli do not buy sli, because they need it. They just buy it to max out the limit to show others. It is their hobby to show balls in hardware. They will never buy older cards to upgrade system. So: As long as the general idea of sli will be done on other ways and with other intention(e.g. For using one gpu for one monitor seperately), it will never get satisfying. There are simply too much ideas and too much possibilities, which they would like to offer. That is, why it simply never reaches a single gpu like performance.

Just my opinion. If techniques do not change, it will not get satisfying. And you can theoretically do a quad sli with some 560's and CloD will not run much faster than before.

OK, so how do I get nVidia surround without a SLI config?

[ATAG_Septic]

Originally Posted by Stublerone

Just edit: Doesn't it sound strange, that your SLI is using 95% vram on both cards with 3gb each? You can simply see: With 2 lower cards with 1500 mb vram, you will be again bottlenecked, as u cannot use the other vram. Not very effective and that is, why sli isn't providing a way better performance on smaller sli rigs as desired.

And this is VERY often the case in games, that it do not take advantage of the vram. Normally the guys do not see it, as current games are not using a lot mor than 1 GB vram. But this is waste ...

I try not too risk a disagreement on the 1c forums but; The memory is not wasted if both GPUs are using it. Half of it would be wasted if you are not using SLI (and have two GPUs) as each GPU only accesses its own Vram.

I do of course know this to be true because I read it on the internet

Cheers,

Septic.

[Stublerone]

What i wanted to say: Smaller cards are sufficiently using their vram.

A correction from my side concerning this: As cards are getting larger vram, multi gpu can be used without any limits, because every card has enough. Smaller cards in current sli state are less efficient, because they get bottlenecks and up to now and with current techniques, it will not change very soon.

That is why I always suggest not to upgrade with sli. Perhaps this changes, but i bet, that it will take several more years to take it into consideration without these doubts. I was not referring to your system, because you have too much reserves. U just can see, that it is not efficiently scaled and this is often the case.

Concerning sorround: New nvidias also have them ready for surround gaming, but sorry: I am also an nvidia guy normally, but when you talk about sorround gaming, eyefinity is the betterbsolution and ati cards are performing way better in high resolutions by nature. So, we have to wait for the real kepler to evaluate their behaviour.

Up to now, the 680 dies against 7970 in high res or better say ultra hgj res with triple monitor setup.

[von Pilsner]

Originally Posted by Stublerone

I just say to everyone asking me: Warning! Shit idea with sli!!!Warning!!!

Nobody was asking you...

You are the guy who jumped into the SLI request thread to tell us our gear is shit... Obvious you are just trying to start a fight. Too bad the moderators are cool with this kind of behavior.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by von Pilsner

Luthier said it was working a long time ago so I think that politely asking for SLI support is within reason.

If you think having a SLI setup is 'wrong' or 'bad' here is why I have an SLI system.

I purchased a SLI capable MB because I enjoy triple screen gaming. FLight sims and racing sims are very nice with super wide fov and trackIR. I am not rich so I build my system a piece at a time.

I don't want to keep using softth (as great as it is) because I want a hardware solution (nVidia 2D surround is what I'm shooting for [requires SLI] - just need 1 more monitor [or 3 new ones possibly ]). MatroxTH2GO had more limitations than just buying a 2nd card. As I understand it the super multimonitor nvidia cards are 2 GPUS in SLI mode on one card so I am not left with many options...

So there are valid reasons for SLI setups (even if you enjoy flight sims).

Cheers

Sure, i'm not saying it's wrong or bad. What i was trying to point out is that it has been historically troublesome to implement properly in our gaming genre, so i'm not willing to purchase a setup with a history of under-utilization, unless i have no other choice.

Like your example illustrates, gaming on multiple monitors with specific cards may be one of those "no other choice" cases obviously and nobody can blame you for going with it.
For single screen setups however, i feel like setting myself up for trouble if i decided to go for SLI and will always prefer a single card.

[von Pilsner]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

Sure, i'm not saying it's wrong or bad. What i was trying to point out is that it has been historically troublesome to implement properly in our gaming genre, so i'm not willing to purchase a setup with a history of under-utilization, unless i have no other choice.

Like your example illustrates, gaming on multiple monitors with specific cards may be one of those "no other choice" cases obviously and nobody can blame you for going with it.
For single screen setups however, i feel like setting myself up for trouble if i decided to go for SLI and will always prefer a single card.

I agree with that, more complexity = more potential problems.

But when you are in microcenter with a bit of $$ in your pocket and you already have an SLI capable MB things are bound to happen...

Getting great frame rates in most of the games I enjoy is a nice side-effect.

[335th_GRAthos]

SLI is for sure the only reasonable way to handle "three monitor view" = three times the standard single monitor view = three times more pixels than a single monitor.
Unfortunately not there yet with CoD but I still hope...

Three screens, pffft!


These were the setups when real men used to fly flight sims!




PS. This was probably FS_Phat's room in his young age...

~S~

[RickRuski]

Results with my Sli are similar to Septic's, you are soon aware if your Sli isn't working as it should. One card will be idling with hardly any use and the other will be running near 90--99% and temps will be up. My system shows both cards in Sli using near 95---100% V/ram and the use between the 2 cards is within 2% of each other (one using the most then the other). Temps are about 57--62deg in Sli and don't normally go over that. This is the first rig that I've built with Sli and the next one will be Sli also unless technology changes to someting better, but whatever my next board is it will have the option for either. I see that a lot of modern boards (the better ones have the option for either Sli or Crossfire) are set up for multi cards so are the detractors saying the technology is wrong. A few years ago it was hard to get a M/b with this sort of technology now a lot of manufactures are doing it.

[Stublerone]

I am just saying, that they should be aware, that you will always have problem with sli and crossfire.

@Pilsener: Are you perhaps the agressive one from us? I never was agressive towards the initial poster or other sli users. I was just giving a statement about the problems and that you are not able to solve stutters etc. in CloD, only if you have high vram cards like 3 gb. Otherwise you are currently bottlenecked, even if you do a quad sli. There is just no addressing for the memory in clod, which sufficiently devides workload. So, even a quad sli rig with 1,5 gb vram will run on 100% vram load and soon bottlenecks the same way as a single card. And how much fps do u get is not important, as your sli will perform bad.

The intention behind my post originally was, that, if techniques do not change, you will never have sufficient results. No efficient results and the fact, that sli is not a massively used feature, will lead us to the result, that developer wouldn't care about that sli topic, how you wish.

My personal feeling on that: You will get an sli profile, but as all other developers as well, they wouldn' t care much about that. Please not evaluate this, as it is my opinion and just a wild shot in the dark. Yous simply have to be lucky to get agood initial profile.

[Prime Time]

I have 2xGTX580m in SLI and every other game I have runs SLI just fine, including ROF and IL2:1946. Lets face it, the CloD developers can't even get AA working, which is frankly ridiculous.