Setting up Sli

[RickRuski]

Hi Jimbop,

I have just updated to the latest Beta Nvidia drivers and find very little difference for me from the previous version. What I asked you for was your personal settings in "Inspector" and "Nvidia Control Panel" not your fps and ingame video settings, I wanted to have a look at what exactly you are using so that I might help you get it working more to your liking. Without that information I'm only guessing at where to start for you.
I'm running 2x gts450 Sli and have very playable frame rates with minor stutters low down over land but not bad enough to stop me enjoying the sim. It sounds like you haven't added "Launcher.exe" to your Control panel settings to match the Inspector profile, these are what I need to see to be able to help. If you are not sure how to do this ask for help, I will be very happy to. I know that the "Compatibility bits" setting refers to a Star wars setting but a lot of settings refer to multiple games. If you don't wish to try all suggested settings, then experiment with the settings yourself to try and get the best that you can. I am running all my in game video settings on High except for Building amount and Forests which are both medium, my resolution is 1280 x 960 on a 19" lcd, roads "on", Shadows "off" (find that is a big hit on fps) 2 x AA, V/S "off". Don't have any noticeable tearing, have tried it both ways and find "off" suits me better.

One thing to have a look at, in the Nvidia control panel when you set it up for Sli (I suppose you have) under the Physics settings make sure that you have CPU selected other wise one of your cards will be allocated for Physics use.

Your 2 x GTX480's should eat this sim.

Cheers

Rick

[diveplane]

Originally Posted by EZ1

I just got it all set up and and running per instructions from RickRuski. Results: Yes, it runs evenly on both GPUs. Yes, it is pretty smooth but not quite as smooth as single GPU. But, I don't see any performance improvement. I would think SLI isn't going to give us much until they get AA working right.

Thanks again for the info.

sli has always been a bit of a gimmic, never been right since day one that technology many dev teams still over look this feature, how about, or even better introduce x4 cpu support , i know dcs a10c dev team started to introduce multi cpu support , allowing audio to run on one cpu while the other cpu handles the general sim duties.

imo skip sli for now waste of time. rather see multi cpu support first.

[RickRuski]

Don't know how you come to that conclusion Diveplane, have you ever tried Sli??. Just to give you some figures from my system: -


AMD Phenom2 965 x 4 3.4gig
8gig DDR3 Ram
2x GTS 450 Sli (1gig each)
1Tb HDD Partitioned x 5
700w Coolermaster single rail P/S 52a
19" Samsung 931BW monitor
1280 x 960 Resolution

Here is what is happening for me with Sli disabled and enabled running "London Attack" single player track.

Sli disabled: - 30----33 fps (still some micro stutters)

Sli enabled: - 53---56 fps (still some micro stutters)

Load on the graphics cards is about 70% running Sli, about 90% Sli disabled.

Using tracks over the channel I'm am getting fps 90--100 (Sli)

Both cards are running with temps of around 58---59deg

This is with graphics cards that most would consider un-useable with COD. So I personally think Sli is a good option but you must want it to work and it takes a bit of patience to set it up.
There are a lot of games that support Sli and more are being added all the time, I'm sure that the developers will get their Sli support fixed finally.

Cheers

Rick

[jimbop]

Yes, not to mention that video cards will become predominantly multi-GPU just as CPUs have. SLI, or multi-GPU, support is becoming increasingly important and should not be overlooked.

RickRuski, I'll extract the settings later today. Thanks for the helpful attitude.

[diveplane]

Originally Posted by RickRuski

Don't know how you come to that conclusion Diveplane, have you ever tried Sli??. Just to give you some figures from my system: -


AMD Phenom2 965 x 4 3.4gig
8gig DDR3 Ram
2x GTS 450 Sli (1gig each)
1Tb HDD Partitioned x 5
700w Coolermaster single rail P/S 52a
19" Samsung 931BW monitor
1280 x 960 Resolution

Here is what is happening for me with Sli disabled and enabled running "London Attack" single player track.

Sli disabled: - 30----33 fps (still some micro stutters)

Sli enabled: - 53---56 fps (still some micro stutters)

Load on the graphics cards is about 70% running Sli, about 90% Sli disabled.

Using tracks over the channel I'm am getting fps 90--100 (Sli)

Both cards are running with temps of around 58---59deg

This is with graphics cards that most would consider un-useable with COD. So I personally think Sli is a good option but you must want it to work and it takes a bit of patience to set it up.
There are a lot of games that support Sli and more are being added all the time, I'm sure that the developers will get their Sli support fixed finally.

Cheers

Rick

still in its infancy , yes i agree sure they will fix it soon enough, but for greater performance for everyone, my point being the introduction of extra cpu threads, but this involves rewriting code. which should have been taken into account from day one.

[r0bc]

Originally Posted by diveplane

sli has always been a bit of a gimmic, never been right since day one that technology many dev teams still over look this feature,

I've been using SLI since the 8800 series and its always worked well and 99% of games have SLI support on day one

[jimbop]

Originally Posted by RickRuski

Hi Jimbop,

I have just updated to the latest Beta Nvidia drivers and find very little difference for me from the previous version. What I asked you for was your personal settings in "Inspector" and "Nvidia Control Panel" not your fps and ingame video settings, I wanted to have a look at what exactly you are using so that I might help you get it working more to your liking. Without that information I'm only guessing at where to start for you.
I'm running 2x gts450 Sli and have very playable frame rates with minor stutters low down over land but not bad enough to stop me enjoying the sim. It sounds like you haven't added "Launcher.exe" to your Control panel settings to match the Inspector profile, these are what I need to see to be able to help. If you are not sure how to do this ask for help, I will be very happy to. I know that the "Compatibility bits" setting refers to a Star wars setting but a lot of settings refer to multiple games. If you don't wish to try all suggested settings, then experiment with the settings yourself to try and get the best that you can. I am running all my in game video settings on High except for Building amount and Forests which are both medium, my resolution is 1280 x 960 on a 19" lcd, roads "on", Shadows "off" (find that is a big hit on fps) 2 x AA, V/S "off". Don't have any noticeable tearing, have tried it both ways and find "off" suits me better.

One thing to have a look at, in the Nvidia control panel when you set it up for Sli (I suppose you have) under the Physics settings make sure that you have CPU selected other wise one of your cards will be allocated for Physics use.

Your 2 x GTX480's should eat this sim.

Cheers

Rick

RickRuski, the reason I did not include my Inspector profile settings (I assume this is what you mean by 'personal settings') is that they are exactly as per your post #1 with only your recommendations changed from the default settings. I would just be copy/pasting your post #1 settings. Let me know if this is not adequate and, if not, what you would prefer.

Yes, I have pointed the profile to launcher.exe in both Inspector and then NVIDIA Control Panel. The cards are running at identical clocks etc.

The point of the screenshots was to demonstrate that SLI was working to some extent but certainly not doubling the framerate. SLI causes annoying stutters / sudden framerate drops (call it what you will) compared with single GPU.

[RickRuski]

Hi Jimbop and all,

I was hoping to upload to file factory a copy of my settings in inspector but at this stage I can't get it to copy correctly. Until I can sort the problem the file has been deleted.

Update: - link fixed see original post page one

Cheers

Rick

[KeBrAnTo]

Hi all,

I've been doing tests for the last week and a half and I think I found another interesting setting that somehow increases performance greatly. I should say that there is not FPS gain, at least in my case, but everything runs smoother on higher graphic settings.

Now I'm playing at AA 4x Supersampling at Medium settings ingame and runs great at 65 FPS.

You should try "Dynamic Tiling" ON in the nVidia Inspector profile settings and also disable AA ingame if you have applied the override setting on AA in nVidia Inspector.

[335th_GRAthos]

Originally Posted by RickRuski

I was hoping to upload to file factory a copy of my settings in inspector but at this stage I can't get it to copy correctly. Until I can sort the problem the file has been deleted.

Update: - link fixed see original post page one

Cheers

Rick

Hi Rick,

after the painful experience of FileFactory (never saw so much advertising before... ) I took the liberty to find a comfortable way to post your pictures:




I hope you do not mind...

You can copy the links and have the pictures shown on your post at page1...


~S~