SLI Incompatibility

Marvin · 27 Jun 2011 at 08:48

harmony said:
I'm not commenting on GTX460s in SLI purchased about 1 year ago - it could be a decent choice. What I'm saying is that GTX560 1GB is not that cheap - but for about the same price people should get 6950 2GB CF instead, to avoid lag spikes due to vram shortage.

You show me where you can get a 6950 2GB for £145. Even my choice of two 2GB GTX560s ended up £60 cheaper than 6950 2GB CF.

Arcane · 27 Jun 2011 at 10:56

If the OP is interested in maxing out both cards with older titles then you have got options in the cp for using one of the cards for huge levels of AA, SLI AA i believe it's called.

MumboJumbo · 27 Jun 2011 at 14:23

Blue160 said:
SLI 480's are around £400. SLI 460's are around £240.

If you already have a single 460/560, a strong PSU, and a compatible motherboard, adding another is a good cost effective upgrade. If you're starting from scratch I'd agree there are better ways to go (probably single 6950 with the option of another at a later date).

True, but I was talking from a first time buy perspective. Obviously if you already own one it's a bit differnt. But even then I might argue that at the time putting another 100 into the mix and getting a 480GTX would still be better value for money. But that depends on how much you value an extra 100.

Blue160 · 27 Jun 2011 at 17:06

8igdave said:
True, but I was talking from a first time buy perspective. Obviously if you already own one it's a bit different.

But that's the point! The OP does already own one 560 :rolleyes:

MumboJumbo · 27 Jun 2011 at 17:40

Blue160 said:
But that's the point! The OP does already own one 560

just as well I was talking about 460's and not 560's then huh?

My post was not in regard to the OP.

Ch3m1c4L · 28 Jun 2011 at 09:23

harmony said:
295s can't do DX11, that's it. 480s should be in trouble.

You are not alone. It's a known bug for current nVidia driver. Campaign map stuttering + low fps in sea battles. Anyone who claims not having those problems are just pretending to be running with nVidia high-end cards in SLI or they are wasting money because they don't even know what is called lag spikes.

I meant I dont have problems with SLI giving me lower fpsin certain instances. I know the 295's couldnt do dx11, and they had issues maxing it in dx 10 due to VRAM. the 480s can do 3 or 4x AA max all at 2560, higher AA than that and the benchmark doesnt run saying it needs another ~190mb VRAM.

I was purely pointing out to the guy who was having issues that it isnt just because he has SLI. When I first got my 295s (with one or two) I had lots of micro stuttering issues for ~a month until I took the time to test what each driver setting did and how it affected it all. Now I know how to set it all up nicely I do not see micro stuttering, and as long as in Metro I have AAA and nor MSAA and in shogun I just use 2x AA to play it safe to avoid FPS drops to 0.x due to hitting a VRAM cap. At 1080p though the 480s have no issues with anything.

MumboJumbo · 28 Jun 2011 at 11:20

Ch3m1c4L said:
I meant I dont have problems with SLI giving me lower fpsin certain instances. I know the 295's couldnt do dx11, and they had issues maxing it in dx 10 due to VRAM. the 480s can do 3 or 4x AA max all at 2560, higher AA than that and the benchmark doesnt run saying it needs another ~190mb VRAM.

I was purely pointing out to the guy who was having issues that it isnt just because he has SLI. When I first got my 295s (with one or two) I had lots of micro stuttering issues for ~a month until I took the time to test what each driver setting did and how it affected it all. Now I know how to set it all up nicely I do not see micro stuttering, and as long as in Metro I have AAA and nor MSAA and in shogun I just use 2x AA to play it safe to avoid FPS drops to 0.x due to hitting a VRAM cap. At 1080p though the 480s have no issues with anything.

I'm not talking about benchmarks, I'm talking about actual game play. SLI 480GTX gives me <10 fps in ship battles, with a single one I get about 25 fps.

In land battles I get ~55 fps with a single and around ~60 with sli.

This is all with maxed out settings and 4xAA. I don't get how I have these troubles and you don't

Ch3m1c4L · 28 Jun 2011 at 11:50

8igdave said:
I'm not talking about benchmarks, I'm talking about actual game play. SLI 480GTX gives me <10 fps in ship battles, with a single one I get about 25 fps.

In land battles I get ~55 fps with a single and around ~60 with sli.

This is all with maxed out settings and 4xAA. I don't get how I have these troubles and you don't

Benchmark data was aimed at harmony.

I would do some tests for you, and let you know all the settings I am using, but my PC is currently sat all packed up in boxes along with everything else I own bar my work laptop and some clothes, since I am moving house and all my stuff is being picked up tomorrow.

Whats your cpu usage like while your on a sea battle? I found on my 295's that I could be happily playing at X fps, but with more units/settings even if the GPU usage and VRAM usage was < 70% my cpu usage was sometimes up at 100% on Core 1 and 80% on the other cores and would cause my fps to hang/stutter madly. as soon as core 1 dropped below 100% I would go back to playable FPS.

Now Im on an I7 and freshly formatted the PC which has fixed media player permanently eating 20-25% cpu usage (even though i had turned off everything in it), I dont have any cpu usage problems now.

Try it with/without Vsync, turning on and off optimizations in the drivers, and turn off transparency AA, threaded opt to on, single monitor mode, maximum performance instead of adaptive etc. Triple Buffering is better than Vsync btw.

I would need to check what they are with my 480s, as I cant guarantee that I have set transparency to on/off.

MumboJumbo · 28 Jun 2011 at 11:53

Ch3m1c4L said:
Benchmark data was aimed at harmony.

I would do some tests for you, and let you know all the settings I am using, but my PC is currently sat all packed up in boxes along with everything else I own bar my work laptop and some clothes, since I am moving house and all my stuff is being picked up tomorrow.

Whats your cpu usage like while your on a sea battle? I found on my 295's that I could be happily playing at X fps, but with more units/settings even if the GPU usage and VRAM usage was < 70% my cpu usage was sometimes up at 100% on Core 1 and 80% on the other cores and would cause my fps to hang/stutter madly. as soon as core 1 dropped below 100% I would go back to playable FPS.

Now Im on an I7 and freshly formatted the PC which has fixed media player permanently eating 20-25% cpu usage (even though i had turned off everything in it), I dont have any cpu usage problems now.

Try it with/without Vsync, turning on and off optimizations in the drivers, and turn off transparency AA, threaded opt to on, single monitor mode, maximum performance instead of adaptive etc. Triple Buffering is better than Vsync btw.

I would need to check what they are with my 480s, as I cant guarantee that I have set transparency to on/off.

I shall try this out latter, trying to fix some DLL problem which is stopping 3dmark06 from working. I downloaded the DLL from creative's website and it still didn't work. Figured I'd use 3dmark06 to check that my sli is working correctly.

I'm not sure but I probably do have vsync on but sli 480s should be able to handle that. I will have to take it off, discovered yesterday that sli in GTA:SA drops you to 26fps for some reason. I'm guessing it's the max refresh rate of the console version but seriously they could have edited it for pc!

Good luck with the house moving. Uni I take it?

MumboJumbo · 28 Jun 2011 at 11:59

Oh also I'm running a 2500k at 4.4ghz with 8gb of ram so I don't think it should be a cpu or ram problem. Unless I have a hardware fault.

:EDIT:

Having said that my hard drive is starting to get rediculasly slow at just opening my downloads folder and it's not a big folder really. Maybe my harddrive is to blame. Though only shogun 2 is showing problems.

Ch3m1c4L · 28 Jun 2011 at 12:12

Na not uni, I recently moved back from Iceland and started IT Consultancy, so moving to London as I am getting enough work between doing that and some AutoCAD design work

CPU/RAM will not be an issue at those speeds. Try getting 3dmark vantage or 2011, 06 didnt work that well with SLI anyway tbh.

If it is something to do with HDD read speeds, that would be a big difference in our setups, since my OS is on a vertex and my games are on a 5 drive RAID 5 of sammy F1's, and even its 4k read speed is pretty stupidly high.

Once I am up and running again I will check how everything is running and what settings I am using and let you know, so I can try to help you out. It is possible that I didnt try a water map with just two cards, and have only ran it on 3 or 4 gpus and maybe its scaling is ok for them, but not 1 - 2?

MumboJumbo · 28 Jun 2011 at 12:29

I see, sounds pretty decent. I plan to move into london some time after uni. Doing a maths degree so that's where the money will be at.

Yeah I'll try get on them instead, well my hard drive was formatted when I put this pc together so it can't have been longer than 6/7 months tops since it was formatted and it's still got 400gb of space left so i'd like to think it's just windows being crap about opening my downloads folder for some reason :S. I do need to get my self an SSD though so my pc is complete.

Cheers, i'm running at 1920x1200 maxed out everything including unit size with 4xaa as far as I can remember. Would be strange if it scaled 3/4 gpus better than 2. Especially seems as I get negative scaling in sea battles.

Ch3m1c4L · 28 Jun 2011 at 13:09

8igdave said:
I see, sounds pretty decent. I plan to move into london some time after uni. Doing a maths degree so that's where the money will be at.

Yeah I'll try get on them instead, well my hard drive was formatted when I put this pc together so it can't have been longer than 6/7 months tops since it was formatted and it's still got 400gb of space left so i'd like to think it's just windows being crap about opening my downloads folder for some reason :S. I do need to get my self an SSD though so my pc is complete.

Cheers, i'm running at 1920x1200 maxed out everything including unit size with 4xaa as far as I can remember. Would be strange if it scaled 3/4 gpus better than 2. Especially seems as I get negative scaling in sea battles.

What driver version are you running? As if it doesnt have an SLI profile it obv might not work properly, or if you have manually set in either global 3d settings or shogun 2 3d settings to do a different kind of AFR than I have then that could cause it to fail. Some games like different styles of AFR, so its worth changing them around anyway, as I have found that sometimes the Nvidia one isnt always the best, although that is very few games.

The 270.51 Betas were the first ones with an SLI profile built in for Shogun 2

One thing I did notice on my setup, was that the 3rd card was often 2-30% more load on it than cards 1 and 2, which confused me, and it wasnt some hidden phyzX thing as I changed the card that was using to GPU 1 and it didnt change. Havent established why this happens though, and it was only in the "light" gpu instances as otherwise all cards were up at 90-100% anyway.

MumboJumbo · 28 Jun 2011 at 13:53

Ch3m1c4L said:
What driver version are you running? As if it doesnt have an SLI profile it obv might not work properly, or if you have manually set in either global 3d settings or shogun 2 3d settings to do a different kind of AFR than I have then that could cause it to fail. Some games like different styles of AFR, so its worth changing them around anyway, as I have found that sometimes the Nvidia one isnt always the best, although that is very few games.

The 270.51 Betas were the first ones with an SLI profile built in for Shogun 2

One thing I did notice on my setup, was that the 3rd card was often 2-30% more load on it than cards 1 and 2, which confused me, and it wasnt some hidden phyzX thing as I changed the card that was using to GPU 1 and it didnt change. Havent established why this happens though, and it was only in the "light" gpu instances as otherwise all cards were up at 90-100% anyway.

I'm new to sli so haven't fiddled with any profiles yet. I'm running 275.33 I believe. Is a pain finding the driver version as device manager doesn't give you the right one.

Both my cards run at 90-100%. In fact in a water battle it stress tests them harder than furmark does and they reach over 100 degrees. These are SE versions too so shouldn't run that hot. I got SE's because the corsair 650d is pretty good at extracting heat.

my second gpu handles the physX I think.

Ch3m1c4L · 28 Jun 2011 at 14:24

8igdave said:
I'm new to sli so haven't fiddled with any profiles yet. I'm running 275.33 I believe. Is a pain finding the driver version as device manager doesn't give you the right one.

Both my cards run at 90-100%. In fact in a water battle it stress tests them harder than furmark does and they reach over 100 degrees. These are SE versions too so shouldn't run that hot. I got SE's because the corsair 650d is pretty good at extracting heat.

my second gpu handles the physX I think.

by default the "end" gpu handles physx, not that its in shogun afaik anyway though.

The only reason i tried running with 2 gpus is that the first two go to 63 after a few hours of shogun, but the third goes up to 110 in a few minutes and shuts down. So I need to repaste it (must have cocked it up during the waterblock install) but couldnt be assed doing it just before I moved and would have to drain my loop then anyway.

Nvidia Control panel > help? > system information
Thats where you can get the driver details of everything your running to do with Nvidia

MumboJumbo · 28 Jun 2011 at 15:04

Ch3m1c4L said:
by default the "end" gpu handles physx, not that its in shogun afaik anyway though.

The only reason i tried running with 2 gpus is that the first two go to 63 after a few hours of shogun, but the third goes up to 110 in a few minutes and shuts down. So I need to repaste it (must have cocked it up during the waterblock install) but couldnt be assed doing it just before I moved and would have to drain my loop then anyway.

Nvidia Control panel > help? > system information
Thats where you can get the driver details of everything your running to do with Nvidia

Would be so cool if it did run physX, just imagine all those rag doll effects on thousands of bodies. Of course you'd need probably sli 480's to run the game and then another pair of sli 480s to run the phyx

.

Ah yeah, that must be a pain. I've always avoided cleaning blocks because it looks like a nightmare. I don't really think watercooling is needed now days with cpu's being so cool and I reckon the 580s could run tri sli without watercooling needed. Obviously 480s wouldn't though.

Yeah that is how I found it.

Ch3m1c4L · 28 Jun 2011 at 16:12

Once oc'd the temps and power draws go up, colder = higher stable OC generally, and also longer lasting components

*Note, this is not always true, but it does look shiny.

MumboJumbo · 28 Jun 2011 at 16:19

Well yeah I know that but in reality you don't need to overclock at all with sli or tri sli 580s

.

cactwma · 28 Jun 2011 at 19:59

Out of interest, how much would I get for a 560 Ti in a years time? I am thinking about upgrading when the new generation comes out

MumboJumbo · 28 Jun 2011 at 20:30

Probably not a lot.