Bad SLI Advice???????

Here’s a quote from a recent thread here:

“SLI is not really even needed at the moment since most games dont even support them.”

I’ve seen this thought expressed on this forum several times, and on several other forums as well. However, I’m not sure that it’s true and I fear it may be very bad advice.

In the short time I had an SLI machine I was able to force games to run in SLI simply by creating an Application Profile in the nVidia Control panel. This caused the “SLI meter” to appear on the left side of the screen (indicating SLI was working), seemed to help in higher resolutions, and, except for Oblivion, the games ran smoothly.

The guys over at nVidia SLI Zone think the same and here’s a link to that site for instructions on how to set up a profile:

http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_appprofile.html

My personal experience with SLI is very limited, so I can’t possibly purport to know which of these views is right. However, this forum is a valuable source of information generally, so I hope someone who truly does know will jump in here and straighten things out.

 

Personally I have not tried SLI yet either. SLI is still young.

I think this is another discussion very similar to quad core vs dual core.

Unless the application is utilizing SLI specifically, you will not get truly significant gains from SLI.

Although small gains are always there I think. but I think the argument shows that money wise, its not always economical.

I think that more and more games will be SLI capable now though, as that is the future.

NVidia is already coming out with Quad SLI so... who knows what that means for the future of gaming. Two cards with Two GPU's each.

I think the majority of issues are drivers issues which surely will be sorted out soon.

 

i think SLI is usable on high definition display; like 2560x1620 screen resolution, you might also notice an improvement at 1920x1200 but i doubt it will be worth the price...
i think the advantage of SLI technology is; the option of having to low/mid-range card hooked together eg. 8600GT SLI or 8800GT SLI or the like.

 

SLI is useless for now... like quadcore... or raid0...

the 2nd videocard is used between 0 and 40%... what a waste of money... just keep this money and buy the next top end card... the 9xxx series...

cpu give no real performance at high resolution... and raid0 give no performance ingame (loading can be like 5% faster)

 

^ I agree with all that except the cpu, quad core are much better than dual cores because i have seen this in person.

 

Aryantes
Wobble987
MegaBUD
DivineRiku

To make this thread more helpful would you kindly provide more detail about your unsatisfactory SLI experiences, or site good references?

Thanks

 

theres no fps difference in crysis in high res with a slow core2 or a fast quadcore

 

I am probably one of the ones you have read "bashing" SLI on these forums. My Alienware m9700 with SLI Go 7900 gets a higher 3DMark score than my single 8800M GTX in my new Sager. I can tell you from first hand experience that the 8800M GTX is a faster card, regardless of benchmarking. I can also assure you that the 8800M GTX is more than enough card to play any game out there on the highest settings with the exception of Crysis, which nontheless looks phenomenal on medium or "high".

Very few games or applications are able to utilize SLI to it's full potential. 3DMark seems to be one of the few that does. When assessing if you need 8800M GTX's in SLI, I encourage you to ignore the benchmarks and instead look at FPS counts and decide if 40-70 FPS in most modern games is "good enough" or if you really want to spend another $1000 to add a second video card and enjoy the 50-80 FPS. I would humbly suggest that the extra 10 FPS is irrelevant and the $1000 better spent on a Solid State Drive, RAID box, or 40 brand new games. I point to my new toy (the second system in my sig), which cost me about the same as a second 8800M GTX video card.

 

Have a look at this thread.

It benchmarks desktops with GeForce SLI and ATI CrossFire.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/11/30/rv670_amd_ati_radeon_hd_3870/11

All in all, UNLESS you are playing top of the line, extremely demanding PC games, SLI will not be necessary for you.

SLI will give you ( as of right now, may be better support later ) 10-50% better performance.

You will ONLY see this improvement at maximum settings at the highest resolutions.

crysis 1920x1200 Very High.

Tawnos is right, who cares about 40-70 fps vs 50-80 fps.

Although, 20-30 vs 35-45 is a pretty amazing difference, but I would not spend my last penny for this difference. If I could afford it, I think this would be a satisfactory improvement worth some money.

You just have to have the right games at the right times in order to make it worth it, with the right support, with the right drivers.

There's no point in mentioning SLI for games that don't need the power in the first place, in other words, stuff like UT3 where at maximum settings your single graphics card already hits 60 fps average ( 8800M GTX )

It is just a way to stay on the bleeding edge. SLI WILL BE the future, SLI may not be the present.

Some people will say

"so what, just play those new games at a lower res and lower settings, you will still get amazing performance for the majority games out there"

Is that good enough for you?

 

If you want more first-hand experience with people having difficulty, check the Dell XPS m1730 thread in the Dell forum. Those guys are having some trouble with their SLI 8700's, and it's one of the things that got me looking at Sager.

It just seems that the drivers aren't quite up to task yet.

 

I'd never get SLI in a notebook. Card manufacturers just don't give a damn about the drivers like they do with their desktop counterparts.

 

Hi, kivi,

I had that machine for three weeks and I checked that board quite often. Some of the experienced Vista users certainly had valid driver complaints (I had better luck with XP), but many of the users didn't know how to turn SLI on. I also believe that the "weakness" of the 8700 caught a lot of owners by surprise (I was one of them!)

For me, in that limited trial, SLI worked as I expected with "The Witcher" and "Hellgate: London"-with SLI on I could run smoothly at higher resolutions. "Oblivion" however, with a home made application profile (nVidia doesn't provide one for this game), didn't render well. (Perhaps that's why nVidia didn't produce one in the first place.) So, were Witcher and Hellgate: London "designed" for SLI and therefore worked, and Oblivion not so designed and therefore failed? Or was it just the luck of the draw? I don't have a clue, and that's the basic question in this thread.

 

Good find!

Looks like SLI helped the 8800 GTX quite a bit in high resolution-60% to 70% FPS increase. Quite impressive, but the question remains-did SLI help because Crysis is "designed for" SLI, or would most games, not so designed, benefit accordingly?

 

Crysis is designed to support SLI.

It is inevitable that everything will incorporate SLI / Quad-Core support in the future, however, the only question is when.

You would think that with the natural progression of technology, that more and more programs would be supporting all the newest graphics cards/ cpus.

A gaming company trying to make an awesome game would be foolish to design a single-gpu game if dual-gpu are readily available and would double their potential for adding eye candy / textures / realistic physics etc.

In my humble opinion, I believe SLI will be more and more in our lives within the next year. Some people do not believe this will happen during the life of today's computer technology, becoming obsolete in 3-4 years.

Leap of faith, I'll take it.

 

I've heard that but I can't seem to find anything about it on the Crysis web site and I just read at Tom's Hardware that the Crysis "optimize settings" function doesn't even recognize the presence of SLI. I'm beginning to think that "SLI support" simply means that an application doesn't screw up SLI in the first place, or, at most, merely sets the SLI controller to the desired SLI mode.

I think I'll spend some time on the nVidia SLIZone forum and see if I can dig up some information over there.

Thanks for your comments.

Edit: There's a list of the 500 or so games for which nVidia has already prepared application profiles at:

http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html

 

Yeah, it seemed kind of random where people were having difficulty or not, and you have a good point about people not understanding how to get things to work.

My decision came to this: I could spend time finding good drivers for inferior SLI-8700's, or buy a better laptop with a single 8800 for $900 less (and it's even a few pounds lighter!).

Now if the XPS had SLI-8800, that might be much better, but would have been even more costly

Why did you return your XPS by the way, Wobble?

 

Chiefly because of the weakness of the 8700, but I had several other problems as well:

1) Dell Media Direct had to be disabled because it screwed up keyboard operation (character repeat). This seemed to a problem unique to my machine.

2) I got frequent shutdowns for overheating. A few users complained of this but it didn't seem to be universal.

3) Certain shades of yellow couldn't be displayed when using XP. I believe this affected all XP users but no Vista users.

I'll admit, though, that I really liked the lighted keyboard, a feature I thought was silly until I used it.

 

Found a good reference for SLI here: http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_faq.html#s8b

Here's an informative quote from that page that suggests virtually any application/game can benefit from SLI (up to 2x FPS) whether designed for SLI or not (Sounds good... hope it's true):

________________________________________________________

What applications are supported with SLI technology?
SLI technology can be enabled for every gaming application, including both OpenGL and Direct3D gaming applications. SLI technology provides either 3D performance scaling using alternate frame rendering (AFR) or split-frame rendering (SFR) or increased visual quality using the SLI Antialiasing mode. In order to provide the optimal 'out-of-box' experience for its customers, NVIDIA has created an extensive set of optimized game profiles which enable SLI scaling automatically. The full list of these SLI-optimized games can be found here. For applications not found in this list, simply follow these quick instructions to set up a new game profile to enable SLI technology. Information about professional application support can be found here.

Why don't all games see performance increases?
Applications which tax the GPU will see tremendous performance improvements of up to 2x with SLI technology when using two graphics cards. Most of today's hottest games and as well as next-generation games fall into this category. However, some applications, typically older generation applications, are limited by factors other than the GPU's processing power.

The most common limitation is the CPU. If an application becomes CPU bound, no additional graphics power can improve performance. This situation is most common at low screen resolutions like 1024x786 with no additional functionality turned on. Turning on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, or switching to higher resolutions, can often move the processing requirements back to the GPU.

For CPU-bound applications, NVIDIA offers a new SLI rendering mode called SLI Antialiasing. This rendering mode allows you to enable SLI8x or SLI16x antialiasing and enhance the visual quality of any gaming application.

What is SLI Antialiasing?
SLI Antialiasing is a new standalone rendering mode that offers up to double the antialiasing performance by splitting the antialiasing workload between the two graphics cards. When enabled, SLI Antialiasing offers two new antialiasing options: SLI8x and SLI16x. A Quad SLI system is capable of SLI32x. In the current driver, this rendering mode can be enabled by following these quick instructions. More information about SLI Antialiasing can be found here. Please note SLI Antialiasing is currently not available on Windows Vista operating systems.

 

yeah... but... in real life its not like that...

 

Yeah I also took a look at that faq.

I agree that most of the general public would not know how to get SLI to work properly on most applications unless it was a one-click "Enable SLI" button.

I plan on trying SLI as soon as it comes out. I think that it is a sure hit. I'll be sure to benchmark my findings of course.

It should only matter on at the highest of resolutions and detail settings.

 

Who cares about real life... I want to play games!

 

Yep, that's when a system is more apt to be GPU-bound I guess.

BTW: I've ordered the 9262 with the E6850 processor. I'll run the Crysis benchmark, as you did, when it comes. It will be interesting to see how the Dual and the Quad compare.

 

thats what i meant by real life...