Coupla questions regarding going SLi.

[pieman109]

I've aquired an SLi capable mobo and got 2 x BFG 8800gts 320mb vidcards and I'm wondering :

Is it worth the hassle?
Is the total vidcard memory used ( 320mb+320 mb) or is it just the memory on one card?
What sort of peformance increase, percentage wise on average, would I see in games? This is basically regarding "crysis" really
Cheers.

 

[Jokester]

What resolution do you game at?

Jokester

 

[pieman109]

1650 x 1080, generally with 2x or 4x AA, and 8x or 16x AF. That obviously depends on the game though.

 

[Rroff]

The total available video memory is the same as one card (320Mb in your case) as each card needs the data required to build the scene - they cant get the data from the other card.

From long benchmarks with rivatuner stat server I was seeing an average performance increase in crysis at 1440x900 of 79.3% over just one card. Overall I see about 80% performance gain in games - but most of the latest titles like bioshock, etqw, etc. will give very close to double the performance of one card - depending on your resolution and settings.

Its a bit of hassle - specially if the game doesn't support SLI properly and you have to use nHancer to get it working correctly - but worth it imo if you want to be able to max out the settings and get playable framerates all of the time...

2x 320Mb card however is going to hold you back a bit from realising the full potential of 8800 series cards in SLI as you won't have enough video memory to max the settings out in all games.

 

[Arcane]

It'd be worth it I reckon, don't know about the AA though, you've only got 320mb vram. Give it a go, it's not really any hassle, pop the side of the case, stick it in the PCI-e slot, push on the bridge, and enable in the drivers, piece of er....pie. You should get a very noticeable increase.

 

[pieman109]

It'd be worth it I reckon, don't know about the AA though, you've only got 320mb vram. Give it a go, it's not really any hassle, pop the side of the case, stick it in the PCI-e slot, push on the bridge, and enable in the drivers, piece of er....pie. You should get a very noticeable increase.

Well, I've got to whip out my original mobo and install the sli capable one, so its a bit more involved than just installing the second card.
Think I'll probably give it a go regardless.

 

[metalmackey]

With the new unified shaders that do load balancing, why cant 2 cards be used the same way as 1 and balance the load between the 2? Eguse all the shaders on 1 card and some on the 2nd for pixel shading and the rest for vertex, or vise versa.

 

[Arcane]

Well, I've got to whip out my original mobo and install the sli capable one, so its a bit more involved than just installing the second card.
Think I'll probably give it a go regardless.

Ahhh...didn't realise, good luck with the build if you go ahead with it.

 

[marscay]

With the new unified shaders that do load balancing, why cant 2 cards be used the same way as 1 and balance the load between the 2? Eguse all the shaders on 1 card and some on the 2nd for pixel shading and the rest for vertex, or vise versa.

because SLI is an old old technology from back in the 3dfx days.