SLI/Crossfire yes or no?
By
Armsman,
Posted on: 2009-06-04 06:04 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Currently I'm playing at your resolution on a GTX260 with most of the settings maxed. I have very VERY few problems with lag due to video card overwork.
Get what you want and crank ALL your settings up.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
CoX officially supports SLI, but last I knew, you don't see any actual benefit from it. IME, generally better to go one good card than two weaker ones.
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Although peole will tell you CoH no longer supports or uses SLI, I still force split fram rendering in SLI mode; and I get a higher framerate than in Single GPU mode. I'm using two NVidia 7950GT's and get a good framerate 40+ in outdoor and 80+ in instances with everything enabled and World and Character detail at 200%; (with 4X and 16X AA in game settings ) so your rig should really fly.
You need to push well beyond the normal desktop resolutions and AA AF settings to see any benefit from SLI.
That being said i'm generally pegged at 60FPS with my single 4850 card at 1920X1200 with 8X AA and 16X AF and ingame settings maxed.
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Although peole will tell you CoH no longer supports or uses SLI, I still force split fram rendering in SLI mode; and I get a higher framerate than in Single GPU mode.
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How much higher?
To the OP: Beefier single card > weak SLI cards, but any single GTX-series NVIDIA card will run City of Heroes without a problem, even at that resolution. ATI has a longstanding series of issues with CoH, so I would stick with the green side of things if you want the rig to play this game well, specifically.
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ATI has a longstanding series of issues with CoH, so I would stick with the green side of things if you want the rig to play this game well, specifically.
[/ QUOTE ] NVidia has had their fair share of driver and texture issues with CoX as well. Don't get me wrong, I love my NVidia better then my old ATI also, but I can attribute that to it being an upgrade anyway. Lets be fair.. either company can be just as good when tweaked properly.
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ATI has a longstanding series of issues with CoH, so I would stick with the green side of things if you want the rig to play this game well, specifically.
[/ QUOTE ] NVidia has had their fair share of driver and texture issues with CoX as well. Don't get me wrong, I love my NVidia better then my old ATI also, but I can attribute that to it being an upgrade anyway. Lets be fair.. either company can be just as good when tweaked properly.
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Sorry, no. ATI's drivers make you pick and choose on eye candy - being unable to use AA, Bloom, and Depth of Field, and the higher-end water effects simultaneously is a bigger issue (to me at least) than the occasional missing texture. Vista SP2 seems to pretty much universally solve that driver crashing issue, or I would have been inclined to agree with you.
The irony is that the ATI hardware is as equally capable as NVIDIA, it just gets hamstrung by driver issues in this game specifically.
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ATI has a longstanding series of issues with CoH, so I would stick with the green side of things if you want the rig to play this game well, specifically.
[/ QUOTE ] NVidia has had their fair share of driver and texture issues with CoX as well. Don't get me wrong, I love my NVidia better then my old ATI also, but I can attribute that to it being an upgrade anyway. Lets be fair.. either company can be just as good when tweaked properly.
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Sorry, no. ATI's drivers make you pick and choose on eye candy - being unable to use AA, Bloom, and Depth of Field, and the higher-end water effects simultaneously is a bigger issue (to me at least) than the occasional missing texture. Vista SP2 seems to pretty much universally solve that driver crashing issue, or I would have been inclined to agree with you.
The irony is that the ATI hardware is as equally capable as NVIDIA, it just gets hamstrung by driver issues in this game specifically.
[/ QUOTE ] Until it was fixed, it was quite annoying to stroll through Grandville with at least half the structures affected by a missing texture, forcing me to change my Detail preferences as well. For me, it wouldn't be so bad not having water or bloom so long as there aren't black holes all over the place. And DoF sucks anyway, so nobody is missing anything there anyway.
There were also several NVidia driver versions that caused the Cox experience to break down entirely. We had to roll back to earlier versions and wait for the next update instead.
Like you said, many of the NVidia issues have eventually been worked out, but some of the ATI ones have as well. We can't rule them out entirely.
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Until it was fixed, it was quite annoying to stroll through Grandville with at least half the structures affected by a missing texture, forcing me to change my Detail preferences as well. For me, it wouldn't be so bad not having water or bloom so long as there aren't black holes all over the place. And DoF sucks anyway, so nobody is missing anything there anyway.
There were also several NVidia driver versions that caused the Cox experience to break down entirely. We had to roll back to earlier versions and wait for the next update instead.
Like you said, many of the NVidia issues have eventually been worked out, but some of the ATI ones have as well. We can't rule them out entirely.
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ATI issues are fixed? I just slapped my old X1600 back in an old rig to test it out and... nope, no fixes. The closest thing we ever got to a fix was Billz' driver settings workaround. So bottom line, NVIDIA issues have been there, but they're fixed now. ATI issues have been there, and they're still there. It wouldn't stop me from buying an ATI card if there was another game out there that I really wanted to, say, play in DirectX 10.1, or something. But to be fair, ATI has standing issues with the game that don't appear to be getting fixed any time soon.
On a side note, I personally like Depth of Field when it's toned down a bit with some registry tweaking (or TweakCoH).
One such problem being the fullscreen cursor errors while using widescreen resolution. Placing enhancements was quite the chore until I got used to how it worked (or didn't work). That was the most annoying problem I ever ran into while playing. That problem seemed to be card-specific and was not present in newer ATI models. It did seem to crop back up for some people, but all you had to do was use windowed mode to correct it (which seems to increase performance anyway).
Like you said, there are slight workarounds to almost any issue you encounter anyway, so it all depends on what is more important to any one person. We also don't know their intentions as far as other games/applications go. Neither you or I can make those judgments for somebody else.
I never said I didn't feel NVidia wasn't overall better than ATI, but I'm not going to tell other people not to buy one. They are still great cards, so that's for them to decide.
For this case, based on the OP's other posts, they seem set on getting NVidia anyway.
meh I have a 4870 on my second machine - dping a respec is a nightmare - you have to move the cursor like 2 inches away and down from the io you want to place...
Single powerful card not always better that weaker sli - the 295 Nvidia's top of the line is just two 260's (granted 55 nm 260s) slaped together on one card...and it's 500+ bucks. I can get two 260's for 125 a piece these days ;P - and since I got the good power supply when I built my rig - 
I am going to do just that and use a 8800gtx as a dedicated physx card - FREEM!
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Single powerful card not always better that weaker sli - the 295 Nvidia's top of the line is just two 260's (granted 55 nm 260s) slaped together on one card...and it's 500+ bucks. I can get two 260's for 125 a piece these days ;P - and since I got the good power supply when I built my rig - I am going to do just that and use a 8800gtx as a dedicated physx card - FREEM!
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The GTX 295 has two GTX 275 GPUs, not GTX 260s. And I was talking on a per-pricepoint basis. If you spend $300 on a card, it will, generally, outperform two $150 cards in SLI.
That said, I wouldn't bother with anything nearly that powerful for City of Heroes, since only one of the three graphics cards in the system will actually be necessary (the second GTX260 in SLI won't give much of a performance boost if any, and the dedicated PhysX card will do absolutely nothing). Is there some other game you have your eyes on to play with this rig?
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the dedicated PhysX card will do absolutely nothing
[/ QUOTE ] That's what we've been trying to tell him in his other thread too. He doesn't believe us. lol
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Single powerful card not always better that weaker sli - the 295 Nvidia's top of the line is just two 260's (granted 55 nm 260s) slaped together on one card...and it's 500+ bucks. I can get two 260's for 125 a piece these days ;P - and since I got the good power supply when I built my rig - I am going to do just that and use a 8800gtx as a dedicated physx card - FREEM!
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The GTX 295 has two GTX 275 GPUs, not GTX 260s. And I was talking on a per-pricepoint basis. If you spend $300 on a card, it will, generally, outperform two $150 cards in SLI.
That said, I wouldn't bother with anything nearly that powerful for City of Heroes, since only one of the three graphics cards in the system will actually be necessary (the second GTX260 in SLI won't give much of a performance boost if any, and the dedicated PhysX card will do absolutely nothing). Is there some other game you have your eyes on to play with this rig?
[/ QUOTE ]I couldnt agree more. To the OP just save yourself some grief just get a Nvidia card 200 series that is 260 or better and you can pretty much run the game set to the max. No need fooling with SLI setups since you get little or no benefit. As for the ATI thing this one is kind of obvious, just whose logo do you see at the bottom of the page? Nvidias of course. Until they fully support both sets of cards stick with Nvidia. I got a system with an ATI card in it at work and it runs the game like crap most of the time and the water textures are borked with the reflection effects, this is with vista and windows 7 and the latest drivers. Lack of support for ATI in this game is the only reason why I couldnt go with an all AMD system in my home rig. I got the 260 at home and it runs excellent at max settings.
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As for the ATI thing this one is kind of obvious, just whose logo do you see at the bottom of the page?
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And the www.cityofheroes.com front page has ATI, its completely obvious that any 3rd party logo anywhere is a marketing thing and has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of special compatibility.
Heck, they still have Ageia down below there, and it doesn't exist as a company at all today.
If a game, any game, needs to wait on the GPU to finish rendering the frame it's currently doing before it can send more data to the card, then having a 2nd GPU helps (assuming alternate frame rendering here). If the CPU does a little bit of work, send data to GPU, repeat until all the frame data is sent, then you won't see much improvement.
It's the ratio between these two extremes that affects the amount of performance increase you will see in a game with multiple GPUs. If a game is rarely waiting on the GPU to finish, you won't see much improvement in average performance but the minimum frame rate recorded will be higher. A game like Crysis, which has nothing but complex frames that take a lot of GPU time to render will naturally have the most improvement in Crossfire/SLi mode.
In the past someone did try SLi testing with their "normal" settings (which is everything except DoF and Bloom) at 1920x1200 as well as one with all the bells and whistles on (DoF and Bloom), using Zloth's demo player to test. At their "normal" settings they didn't see much of an increase except in the minimum frame rate. Average went up slightly. With everything turned on they did see an improvement in average framerate beyond the additional 2 or 3 fps but I don't remember offhand how much.
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If a game, any game, needs to wait on the GPU to finish rendering the frame it's currently doing before it can send more data to the card, then having a 2nd GPU helps (assuming alternate frame rendering here). If the CPU does a little bit of work, send data to GPU, repeat until all the frame data is sent, then you won't see much improvement.
It's the ratio between these two extremes that affects the amount of performance increase you will see in a game with multiple GPUs. If a game is rarely waiting on the GPU to finish, you won't see much improvement in average performance but the minimum frame rate recorded will be higher. A game like Crysis, which has nothing but complex frames that take a lot of GPU time to render will naturally have the most improvement in Crossfire/SLi mode.
In the past someone did try SLi testing with their "normal" settings (which is everything except DoF and Bloom) at 1920x1200 as well as one with all the bells and whistles on (DoF and Bloom), using Zloth's demo player to test. At their "normal" settings they didn't see much of an increase except in the minimum frame rate. Average went up slightly. With everything turned on they did see an improvement in average framerate beyond the additional 2 or 3 fps but I don't remember offhand how much.
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I actually recall some people seeing lower framerates in City of Heroes with SLI running because it exerts a slightly higher workload (if I understand this correctly) on the CPU. The only person I have ever seen with a significantly higher framerate in SLI was some poor [censored] on these forums with a Dell "gaming" laptop that had no discrete video memory (but yes, still had SLI).
That's the worst case. No performance gain to offset the additional overhead caused by sending texture and geometry data to multiple GPUs than just a single one. Again, if the game is waiting on the GPU to finish the frame it's working on before it can continue, then multiple GPUs will provide a benefit.
I'm clear in my guide that I'm not a big believer in Crossfire/SLi. It forces a system designer to design for more power, more cooling and while the big name games that end up as video card benchmarks tend to show multi-GPU boost in performance when all the knobs are cranked to 11 on $1000 30" monitors, most games can be tuned to play very well with the knobs at 8 or 9 on a $200-300 22-24" monitor with a single video card with minimum impact to quality.
Also my feelings on the matter are the result of some simply awful multi GPU setups I've seen advertised with fairly low end cards when a rig with a single card higher end card of equivalent price would eliminate some of the system complexity as well as provide consistently higher frame rates in all games. But newbie PC gamers see SLi or Crossfire and assume that's automatically better than any single card solution, end up being taken in by this hype and getting twin 9500GTs rather than a single 9800GT.
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If a game, any game, needs to wait on the GPU to finish rendering the frame it's currently doing before it can send more data to the card, then having a 2nd GPU helps (assuming alternate frame rendering here). If the CPU does a little bit of work, send data to GPU, repeat until all the frame data is sent, then you won't see much improvement.
It's the ratio between these two extremes that affects the amount of performance increase you will see in a game with multiple GPUs. If a game is rarely waiting on the GPU to finish, you won't see much improvement in average performance but the minimum frame rate recorded will be higher. A game like Crysis, which has nothing but complex frames that take a lot of GPU time to render will naturally have the most improvement in Crossfire/SLi mode.
In the past someone did try SLi testing with their "normal" settings (which is everything except DoF and Bloom) at 1920x1200 as well as one with all the bells and whistles on (DoF and Bloom), using Zloth's demo player to test. At their "normal" settings they didn't see much of an increase except in the minimum frame rate. Average went up slightly. With everything turned on they did see an improvement in average framerate beyond the additional 2 or 3 fps but I don't remember offhand how much.
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I actually recall some people seeing lower framerates in City of Heroes with SLI running because it exerts a slightly higher workload (if I understand this correctly) on the CPU. The only person I have ever seen with a significantly higher framerate in SLI was some poor [censored] on these forums with a Dell "gaming" laptop that had no discrete video memory (but yes, still had SLI).
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It depends on what SLI render method you use. I found AFR1 and AFR2 did reduce performance while SFR did increase it over 'single GPU' mode. Earlier you asked me how much, but I'll answer that here - approx. 10 - 12 FPS.
Believe me, I too think trhat's not really worth it, and were I to do it over again, I WOULD and WILL not use SLI again; but I built this rig in October 2006; and it's worked fine for this and all other game I play. I'll probably upgrade to a single card again when on of the newer MMOs hit the market (like Bio ware's Star Wars - The Old Republic, which will hopefully turn out to be what SWG should have been); but as CoX is the most hardware taxing game on my system; and I get decent FPS, I see no need to blow more cash as yet.
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As for the ATI thing this one is kind of obvious, just whose logo do you see at the bottom of the page?
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And the www.cityofheroes.com front page has ATI, its completely obvious that any 3rd party logo anywhere is a marketing thing and has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of special compatibility.
Heck, they still have Ageia down below there, and it doesn't exist as a company at all today.
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Ageia may not exist commercially, but there technology still does, and the game continues to use PhysX technology, so the logo has a valid reason for being there.
As for your totally blanket statement, you are incorrect. Yes games are designed to "run" on a broad spectrum of video cards, but many companies also specifically test and tweak their engines to perform at their optimum on specific makes and models of cards. The sticker on the box is not always a guarantee of this, but it can be an indication. Some minor research can usually tell you.
As for the ATI label on the front page, that is most likely left over from when NCSoft tried to get in bed with ATI and failed miserably and it was just overlooked by some tired and over worked web designer at the office.
You are a laugh.
Find a post by me and create some reason to be argumentative, good job.
I am pointing out the obvious that the logos are marketing nothing more, if you disagree please find some proof before you blather on some more about it.
I am more than well aware of multiple renderpath support in whatever graphics engine, and why they exist. Based on all my experience with the game and rendering in general i'll bet they have about 7 renderpaths (maybe double that if you include some different OpenGL specific paths) centered around Shader 2.0 support with a few extra command line tweaks like -textenvcombine etc. I doubt very much that they have any extra renderpaths for any specific Nvidia cards or SLI or anything other than 2 paths 1 inclusive of Shader 2.0 support and 1 without. If you think i'm wrong please show proof, not more of your inane garbage.
And finally thanks for agreeing with me (like usual) that the ATI logo is product placement just like the Nvidia logo.
Don't flatter yourself, I do not go looking for posts by you and create reasons to be argumentative, you present these reasons yourself. All you do is insult people who disagree with you and toss out personal attacks. I have given proof in the past and will do so again.
Pull out a copy of a current game title and look under the Graphics section, $5 says the game has been tested on and runs best with nVidia hardware, and then it gives specific product numbers that were tested. Do you see where it says the ATI models that it was tested on and runs best with...oh, wait...there aren't any.
Of course the logos serve a marketing purpose, but that is not there only purpose. The label placement is most often earned and not just paid for. This is an indication to the consumer that the most popular and largest gaming video card manufacturer has been thoroughly tested and designed to work best with this product. I said nothing about an nvidia logo, only what the old ATI logo on the front page was possibly from.
How long have you worked in the video game industry to attain such specific and absolute knowledge of the specific testing that goes into developing, testing, and then producing a graphic engine? And no, your time spent reselling used game carts at GameStop does not count.
Me? I have worked in the industry off and on for going on 11 years now and have worked with several different production and design companies all specializing in graphic design and development. Unfortunately due to contract limitations I am unable to mention most, and the few that I can have been bought or absorbed by larger companies.
The systems used to develop, test and create these games have video cards in them, and the overwhelming cards in them are nvidia. As I said, they do test them on other platforms to ensure a measure of stability and performance, but they pay specific attention to the target market that the game is intended for and then tweak and enhance the engine according to the specific abilities, and limitations of those cards.
One company out of 6 (that I worked for) went beyond just compatibility testing on ATI cards, and tried to tweak it as well as the nvidia cards were working. The hardware has relatively the same capabilities however the drivers were far less accommodating and quite a bit more difficult to work with from a designers point of view.
I am done doing your work for you, if you want to educate yourself Google is a wonderful thing. You have made up your mind and no amount of evidence will dissuade you so I won't waste any more of my valuable time.
Can I give you some advice? The next time someone disagrees you with, and you post a reply, try and leave out the personal attacks. Personal attacks are when a person substitutes abusive remarks for evidence when attacking another person's claim or claims. This line of "reasoning" is fallacious because the attack is directed at the person making the claim and not the claim itself. The truth value of a claim is independent of the person making the claim. In general, it is best to focus one's attention on the content of the claim and not on who made the claim. It is the content that determines the truth of the claim and not the characteristics of the person making the claim.
Does COH support Nvidia SLI and or ATI Crossfire? I am looking to upgrade my video card since I now have a monitor that does 1920x1200.
My options are
4870x2
gtx260 x2 in sli
gtx 285 single card
obvioulsy if it does not support sli/crossfire my decision is easy.