crossfire and SLI

[nightrider1470]

From reading these setups are know longer good anymore apart from selected games.

Why doesnt one of the above companies focus on producing closest to perfect 2 card setups and sell more cards and make potential buyers pull more towards them?

is it really that hard?

 

[Bazippy]

When my 295x2 is able to use cf its brilliant. The fps is far higher then id have thought on brand new games and keeps up with the best single gpu setups. Recently got annoyed that forza horizon 3 doesnt even support it and im left under whelmed by the single gpu usage.
Seems at least amd do a good job of crossfire however its upto the games companies to make it work in the game. With a limited amount of dual gpu setups it seems they dont have to care if it works or not. Ill never shy away from dual gpu if the price is right and ive learnt to deal with temps after lots of experimenting. Even ran 3 7970s for a few days just to see how to manage the heat if nothing else.

 

[Rroff]

Yes it really is that hard - increasingly with advanced use of DX11 or DX12 features it runs into issues like latency penalties accessing data that kill the gains from having 2 cards and so on. There is a reason VRAM is clustered very close around the GPU core and with HBM even moved onto the same interposer as the core.

What it is likely going to need going forward is game developers making use of DX12 explicit multi adapter so they can farm out parts of a game scene to different GPUs in a way they know will be optimal.

 

[hornetstinger]

I thought the benefit of crossfire that is works in all games, unlike SLI it needed to be supported in games.

 

[Bazippy]

I thought the benefit of crossfire that is works in all games, unlike SLI it needed to be supported in games.

Well certainly mafia 3 and forza horizon 3 use only 1 gpu. The second has zero activity.

 

[Rroff]

I thought the benefit of crossfire that is works in all games, unlike SLI it needed to be supported in games.

Nope - under the hood they basically do the same thing at driver level more or less. The difference will be in the level of support for application specific workarounds to make multi GPU work and scale efficiently with a game.

Unlike some think there are little to no multi GPU specific functions accessible to the game/application programmer they either make their product in a way that happens to be compatible with multi GPU or not - while nVidia or AMD can then try and force it to work at driver level there is only so much they can do.

 

[Panos]

From reading these setups are know longer good anymore apart from selected games.

Why doesnt one of the above companies focus on producing closest to perfect 2 card setups and sell more cards and make potential buyers pull more towards them?

is it really that hard?

Depends the game and the producers mostly.

@nightrider1470 you are interested an up to date CF list of supported or not supported games of 2016, and tweaks needed to avoid any issues.
http://amdcrossfire.wikia.com/wiki/Crossfire_Game_Compatibility_List
(please notes games stating Poor eg BF1, run better with some tweaking eg setting process to Medium).

And here you will find the SLI compatible games list.
http://www.geforce.co.uk/games-applications/technology/sli

Don't be surprised if the count is very low on games came out 2016. Is not an error or missing, yes they are far less than the Crossfire ones by a BIG margin, and yes more often than not you will find a game is supporting CF and no SLI these days.

 

[hornetstinger]

I guess games like WOT, War thunder, World of Warships have no dual card support?

 

[Bazippy]

Depends the game and the producers mostly.

@nightrider1470 you are interested an up to date CF list of supported or not supported games of 2016, and tweaks needed to avoid any issues.
http://amdcrossfire.wikia.com/wiki/Crossfire_Game_Compatibility_List
(please notes games stating Poor eg BF1, run better with some tweaking eg setting process to Medium).

And here you will find the SLI compatible games list.
http://www.geforce.co.uk/games-applications/technology/sli

Don't be surprised if the count is very low on games came out 2016. Is not an error or missing, yes they are far less than the Crossfire ones by a BIG margin, and yes more often than not you will find a game is supporting CF and no SLI these days.

Very interesting list, taking it with a pinch of salt though as my experience of bf1 is basically flawless in CF. Id like it if games told you on the adverts if they support it or not. Would have stopped me buying Horizon 3.

 

[Panos]

I guess games like WOT, War thunder, World of Warships have no dual card support?

No they do not, and those games took 90% of my game time over the last 6+ years.

WOT is using an archaic DX9 engine, running on 2 cores. (second core used for the sound only). FPS limited around 117.
WOWs is using a bit more advance engine compared to WOT. This one is limited to 75fps from the settings file. You can go and change the value of the settings file it to eg 143fps and the came will run much faster! But isn't that heavy graphic game.

War Thunder is a complete different beast all together. If you follow the trick bellow you could post 1.37 version, to make it run with SLI or Crossfire

We have SLI support in 1.37. Note: You can do the same with ATI CrossFire too. (instructions below)
Unfortunately, until NVIDIA update their drivers SLI wont work on its own.
You can test it now and report the bugs if they occur.



Open the warthunder config.blk file in windows notepad or your chosen editor.
locate the line: video{
In the next line write: sli:b=true
Then locate the line: debug{
Write in the next line: restart_as:b = true

You should get something like this:

debug{
restart_as:b=true
disableOverlay:b=yes
512mboughttobeenoughforanybody:b=no
noVignette:b=no
screenshotAsJpeg:b=yes
}

video{
sli:b=true
vsync:b=no
adaptive_vsync:b=yes
resolution:t="1280 x 720"
instancing:t="auto"
mode:t="windowed"
disableFlipEx:b=no
AA:t="off"
compatibilityMode:b=no
supersampling:b=no
postfx_antialiasing:t="high_fxaa"
windowed:b=yes
}

You can do the same with ATI CrossFire too (and it may work this way), but the line should be crossfire:b=true (not sli:b=true)

The game should rename the exe file automatically into AFRFriendly-D3D.exe on start up.
You would also need to add AFRFriendly-D3D.exe in the firewall exceptions.


NOTE! - We are not including this in the launcher because this kind of behaviour looks “dangerous” from the anti virus point of view and also because many users will be enabling the feature ‘just in case”.

from here
https://forum.warthunder.com/index....ble-crossfire/&do=findComment&comment=6636572

In addition Armored Warfare is working with CF, at least until I had the 295X2 (Jan 2016). I will let you know next week when I will have CF my Nano to a FuryX if that is the case, also I will let you know about War Thunder.

FYI. War Thunder has far superior engine than WOT, and even a single card can produce triple digit graphics on air battles, and very high ones on tank battles with Movie settings.