Hi guys, I've got a setup atm consisting of: Tagan BZ 1300W power supply, eVGA 750i Cheesecake Mainboard, e8500 cpu @ 3.3 GHz, 2x XFX 512mb 8800GT in SLI Corsair TwinX XMS2 ram @ 800MHz 5 5 5 18 I've been playing Crysis and Company of heroes and wasnt impressed by the performance of the cards, so i decided to run some benchmarks with and without SLI. I got the following: 3dMark06 - With: 15226 Without: 11698 Company Of Heroes performance test, 1680x1050, AA 16x, All setts highest: With: Av: 34.6fps Max: 61.9fps Min: 6.4fps Without: Av: 31.3fps Max: 60fps Min: 19.9fps FEAR performance test, 1280x1024 With: Av: 243fps Max: 711fps Min: 120fps Without: Av: 139fps Max: 374fps Min: 66fps And in crysis, I get the same frame rates with SLI at best, but usually it is worse, and the game is unplayable with SLI on with setts above high, and with setts on high it is annoying to play, so i set them to medium. Without SLI i can happily play with high setts. Obviously the 3dmark score is way higher, and sli performed well in FEAR, but in company of heroes the minimum frame rate was much lower with SLI and no improvements.... Can anyone give some advice on how to tweek it so its better? Anyone else got a similar setup, whats your frame rates like in CoH and Crysis?
In short, SLI is "a bitch". It's effectiveness is very much dependant on how much the game's programmers have optimised the game for SLI. There's a lot more to it than that, but I don't have time to explain. Custom PC magazine did a big feature on it a couple of months ago, try their website.
Yeah i'm a bit dissapointed really, however call of duty 4 works very well, im getting 90 FPS solid throughout multiplayer, never dropping below, with the 'dual graphics card' option in game turned on. I'll try that with SLI turned off later and see what I get. I was hoping company of heroes would work better though, as its supposedly made for nVidia and came with my graphics cards, which have SLI advertised all over them. Hopefully in the future all games will have dual graphics cards features...otherwise I may aswell just sell one of my cards. Does anyone know any good settings to run for company of heroes using SLI? I can't seem to add the COH executable to the profiles options in 3D settings either for some reason, i click Add, find the CoHrelic.exe, open, and it doesnt add it to the list... Just tried cod4 without sli and it runs at about 60-80fps, where SLI is a very steady 91 (seems like it might be locked), so that is a pretty good improvement
Crysis is awful at scaling on multi GPU systems. It just is and theres not much you can do about it. Do you have the newest patches for Crysis. The patches improved SLI and Crossfire performance a bit. I've used two HD 3850's in Crossfire for Crysis and they scaled slightly better than I expected, (which wasn't much!) I got about 1.5x more fps.
Yeah Crysis is the worst so far, outperformed a lot by using a single card. I probably don't have the latest version though, i'll have a look for some patches. To get CoH working better I just turned off Direct X 10 in the settings, now it runs very smoothly and I don't notice any difference in detail. But I think a single card would perform the same still..
From an awesome and playable 60fps to an awesome and playable 91fps? You seem to be expecting some magical double performance with a second card, it just doesn't work like that. SLI to push your minimum or average fps above 25/30 is good, pushing anything high than 60 though (what fps does your monitor display?) probably will not be noticeable.
Maybe knock down AA setting to 2x or 4x, and AF to 8x, you need to raise that min fps in COH so you will have to compromise and reduce some settings :X
well it should work like that! i pay 2x the original price, i want my 2x the performance! i've said many times: until they do shared memory (like dual/quad CPUs) and one control hub (like Intel Skulltrail) multi-GPU is NEVER worth the money or time, it'd always be heavily relay on software optimisation. however, the "Hydra" chip is a right step in the central hub direction. all we need now is for ATI and nVidia to start designing for a shared memory solution based on the central hub design. but we all know that'll never happen, as design cost will be about same as a GPU, yet only 1 or 2 product line to be benifited.
