Graphics SLI Query

[mkh02]

Hey guys a bit of advice needed.

Gonna set up my new system with 2 x GTX680's in SLI.

Now I have not done this before and I do read a lot of stuff about people saying SLI can cause problems in a lot of games that aren't optimised for SLI. The other month's Custom PC put it down as one of their hates!

Is there any merit in this?

I also like to play a lot of games from the last 10 years or so. If I had 2 cards in SLI, is there an option accessable on desktop where I could effectively 'deactivate', one of the cards for older games so i could run them just with one card and avoid any issues.

Doom 3 for example, FEAR 1 or Silent Hill 3 would only need one card for full spec and it would eliminate any issues!

Many thanks!

[Parge]

Yes there is, in the Nvidia control panel.

[mkh02]

In that case Custom PC are off their heads lol!

You can have the power of SLI for modern games where needed and if you need to dial it back to one card it's just a single click!

I can imagine 1 GTX680 card will run a lot of older games at full spec and when you want Battlefield 3 at 1600p just engage the other card!

Also helps with an element of future proofing for gaming!

That has made my day thank you!

[Taniniver]

Running two 570's in SLI here for quite a while now - I honestly think the issues regarding game and driver support are overblown, and I'm not just saying that because I use SLI

The only game I can recall within the past year or so that I tried to play which would not work with SLI was Rage, which is a shame.

In terms of control, you leave the SLI set to "nvidia recommended" in the control panel - usually it just recognises the game and sets it appropriately. You can of course just select "single card" on a per-game basis, if you wish. Seems to work fine for old games too, I played the original Neverwinter Nights (from 2002!) with SLI with no problems.

[.//TuNdRa]

To be more precise; Nvidia has pre-loaded application profiles for all common games, these profiles are usually tweaks to the Nvidia settings to tell it which SLI mode to use and the like, among them is the application detection system, which looks at the Exe, compares it to the library, then pre-loads the settings into the control panel. These almost always include SLI settings, either using Nvidia Reccomended (Alternate Frame Rendering), "Alternate Setting 1" (Possibly split-screen rendering), and "Alternate Setting 2"(Possibly banded rendering. I'm not sure.), and "SLI Disabled", usually the control panel picks up the game on install and sets up the profile, although you may have to manually add steam games to it if you don't create any shortcuts to the game.

[digitaldunc]

Originally Posted by mkh02

lot of stuff about people saying SLI can cause problems in a lot of games that aren't optimised for SLI. The other month's Custom PC put it down as one of their hates!

Is there any merit in this?

Yes, you can experience teething problems, especially in brand new titles. This is why I bought two single GPU cards instead of dual GPU cards as I can disable one of them if need be.

When it works well it's brilliant, just don't count on it as a given -- SLI is more of a luxury than anything.

[Deders]

What resolution are you thinking of running at, and what motherboard/CPU are you going to be putting them in?

There are performance issues to look out for, in a few cases it would be better to have a single card but SLI scaling is usually very good. Sometimes you do have to wait for drivers and profiles to go through the Microsoft WHQL labs (they have to test them with all the graphics cards that they apply to, could be hundreds) even for AAA games.