• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Any problems with going SLI ?

drex69

drex69

drex69

Associate
Joined
9 Sep 2013
Posts
316
Location
Carmarthenshire
Think of going SLI, and was just wondering, what the SLI
experience is like nowadays.

I used to have SLI, 2-3 years ago, and was wondering, have there
been any improvements.

Do we still have micro-stutter for example, not that I ever saw
it anyway...

Also, do new games fully embrace SLI technology straight away, or is
it still a case of waiting for a driver to implement it ?
 
Sli is pretty solid theese days, I've owned several sli setups with recent generations of nv cards. When new games come out fixes are usually pretty quick to appear. The main issues with sli or indeed xfire are the increased heat, power use and noise if on air cooling.
 
Not had many SLI issues in the past few years (unless the game is id tech 5) :p

GTX 295 then 2x 580s and 2 x 970s inc
 
Very reassuring indeed, thanks for the advice.

Obviously, more heat & noise, but they should be ok on air, shouldn't they ?
 
Last edited:
Yep, should be grand. Good slot spacing on your board and good case airflow really help. Moreso if your using non reference cooled cards.
 
I have the Asus Maximus IV Extreme-z motherboard, so spacing, shouldn't
be an issue.

And, as for good case airflow, I have Phankteks Enthoo Primo, so all should be good there.

Well, that's cleared that up then, might have a nice SLI system then :)
 
Micro stutter on SLI is not an issue because the cards have built in hardware to prevent it happening.

The last time I saw it on SLI was with a pair of 8600 GT cards and that was god knows how many years ago.

If micro stutter was an issue with SLI Nvidia would never, ever have developed and released FCAT. It would have simply shown how bad SLI was.

I've been using SLI for many years now and I've always got on with it OK. The odd game launches and doesn't like it but it's as simple as pie to just go into the Nvidia control panel and make a game run from one card any way.

I can't even remember the last time I had any issues with SLI. Crossfire? god, completely different matter....
 
Zero issues here with going SLI. Occasionaly a game requires a new driver to get SLI working but generally they have every base covered before the games are released.
 
Just keep in mind that there's a fair percentage of games that flat out cannot support SLI, so for example if you've invested in the hardware that demands SLI to power it, some games will not be running as you'd hoped.

For example, Company of Heroes 2 simply won't support it, and therefore running at native res and full detail on a 2560x1600 screen can get a bit ropey at times even on a top end card. Obviously 4K would be even worse making it unplayable.

Not a deal breaker for me personally but it's the main issue.
 
Been using SLI for a year now, all works fine and stable. Very little faff just enable SLI in driver and hope to christ that the game you are playing has decent SLI support (Most new games have decent out the box support that improves over time with driver updates).
As far as benching goes the latest drivers give me slightly lower scores on the usual bechmarks but the trade off is smoother SLI performance so that's a non issue.

I play some older games that doesn't need even 50% of 1 of my GPU's thankfully the bottom card usually goes into idle mode to save power (Or switches over to a PhysX card when capable). Overall I like SLI and it saved me a fair few bob.

The downside being increased temps (Especially in summer!) and increased noise although that is subjective to the cooler on your card, your case configuration and your own perception of the noise.

Once in a while you might want to faff a little (IE: some games I have to set to use only 1 GPU as the SLI support is junk, Batman:Arkham origins comes to mind, thankfully the card defaults to a PhysX card now on that netting me decent gains)
 
Only microstutter type issues I've seen in recent history with SLI have been with BF4 (and BF4 is just broken anyway) and that could be mostly worked around with a couple of tweaks.

Overall the experience has been pretty robust for the last 3-4 years.
 
Very true about bf4, hopefully though it should be sorted in the imminent patch. The current CTE build is phenomenally smooth with sli.
 
Worst problem I've had with SLI is nVidia automatically disabling it after you update video drivers.

So yeah, not too many issues. Every now and then you run into a game that doesn't support it which can be a minor annoyance, but usually there's an updated profile available soon or some minor tweaking in the control panel can get it working.
 
hernaldo said:
Just keep in mind that there's a fair percentage of games that flat out cannot support SLI, so for example if you've invested in the hardware that demands SLI to power it, some games will not be running as you'd hoped.

For example, Company of Heroes 2 simply won't support it, and therefore running at native res and full detail on a 2560x1600 screen can get a bit ropey at times even on a top end card. Obviously 4K would be even worse making it unplayable.

Not a deal breaker for me personally but it's the main issue.
Click to expand...

Rule number one of going SLI - always make sure one card can run older/problematic games should you need to go it alone.

In other words - budget SLI (so for example back in the day 2 x GTX 460 vs a single 480) is not a good idea, because one budget card alone usually won't cut it when called upon.

SLI is overkill and something that should be treated and respected as such. I've always done it so I can absolutely max a game (I mean like real max, 8XMSAA whatever) and only once did I run more than one GPU to try and get the same power as the expensive big one.

That was a mistake. In fact, it was probably the most epic mistake I ever made on GPU purchases (two 5770s that were supposed to down the 5870 yet never ever worked properly, and now I know why).

So yeah. In summation stick to two powerful mid/high end cards. Right now I would only really SLI GTX 680 or above (if you can live with 2gb VRAM) or 970s, which would be the best pairing you can put together right now.

As I mentioned before, it's as simple as this -



To disable it. As you can see I have Fallout 3 running on one card because in SLI it flickers like a bitch. I deduced that Nvidia simply couldn't be assed to get it working in later drivers given it was released in 2008.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom