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Does a 9800GX2 use both cores on every game?

mea98rm

mea98rm

mea98rm

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Hi - I currently have an 8800gtx and want to upgrade to a 9800gx2. As I understand, it is basically two G92 cores in SLI on the same physical card.

I've tried SLI before using 2 x 6800gt cards, but the technology was very immature back then, and it only worked properly with a handful of games. Have nVidia sorted their drivers out since then, or will the 9800gx2 still drop back to a single core on some software? (I only play BF2 and WoW on the PC incidentally)

Thanks in advance.
 
I play at 1920 x 1200 with AA and AF on max and both games (even though they are old) will still slow down when there is a lot of foliage on screen. I am GPU limited as the slowdown goes away when I drop the resolution or turn down the AA.

It is good to hear that a 9800gx2 will use both cores in all games - nVidia have finally got SLI working properly. Im tempted to buy it if it will help my framerates, but it still feels like a half-arsed attempt at next gen card. Can't believe each core has less memory and less memory bandwidth than a 8800 which is nearly two years old.
 
mea98rm said:
but it still feels like a half-arsed attempt at next gen card. Can't believe each core has less memory and less memory bandwidth than a 8800 which is nearly two years old.
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because it IS a crappy card compared to 8800GTX.

buy a second GTX if you feel the need, SLi them and you will get better performance than 9800Gx2.
 
It will use both GPU's in games that have working SLI profiles, when new games/demos get released you might end up using a single GPU until they add support, there are also probably games now which lack support or are incompatible for some reason.
 
Last edited:
mea98rm said:
Hi - I currently have an 8800gtx and want to upgrade to a 9800gx2. As I understand, it is basically two G92 cores in SLI on the same physical card.

I've tried SLI before using 2 x 6800gt cards, but the technology was very immature back then, and it only worked properly with a handful of games. Have nVidia sorted their drivers out since then, or will the 9800gx2 still drop back to a single core on some software? (I only play BF2 and WoW on the PC incidentally)

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Today SLI is much the same. It will drop to a single core in some games, (especially the more obscure or older games).
 
ACESHIGH said:
Today SLI is much the same. It will drop to a single core in some games, (especially the more obscure or older games).
Click to expand...

So each game still needs an SLi profile in the drivers for it to run properly on both cores? That's really poor, I'd have expected the boffins at nVidia to have worked out how to use both cores automatically by now.

I guess the 9800gx2 will actually run slower than an 8800gtx on games that don't have a profile. I'll probably give it a miss and wait for something decent then.

Trouble is I'm getting bored. There hasn't been any revolutionary new PC hardware for 18 months now.
 
Minstadave said:
BF2 at 1980x1200 is bugged and remains choppy no matter what card you have iirc.
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Smoke wrecks fps in bf2 and its a massive memory hog. The X2 is actually only half a gig I think so it'd be a downgrade maybe because bf2 can take up all of the gtx video memory

Make sure you have at least 3gb before you spend so much on the graphics card. Memory is a much cheaper effective option, slightly hypocritical of me as I only have 2.3gig for bf2 and its not enough to be flawless still and I only play at 1600x1200
 
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