SLI and Crossfire compatibility
By
Big_SOB,
Posted on: 2010-06-22 18:00 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Quote:
Where do you get your #s? If someone is only getting a 10% increase from SLI, then they don't know what they are doing. A proper SLI/Xfire set up should give you anywhere from 50-300% performance depending on 2, 3, or 4 GPU cores used. If someone spends $600 for a 10% increase, they are an idiot. You can slap together 2 cheap nvidia GTS 250s and see a lot more than 10% increases in most games.|
Originally Posted by ElectroHawk
you make it sound like everyone is using SLI and Crossfire. Last time I checked, SLI and Crossfire was just way too expensive for the performance increase they provided.
A 600$ increase on the budget for a 10% increase in performance (at the very best) is really not worth it for many, even power gamers that are inteligent enough to know when they are throwing money out the window. I am a power gamer and a computer tech and I can see only 1 application where SLI and Crossfire could potentially be of use and that's not even gaming: It's video / 3d rendering. so for a average user (don't forget that more than 90% of the gamers aren't power gamer with loads of cash) SLI is useless. Why would a company like NCSoft and Paragon Studio, invest time and effort in something that less than 10% (and that even seems high to me) will use? And the only argument you seem to be able to make it that TO YOU XP is dead, however, Vista and Windows 7 aren't even officially supported by NCSoft. The code was done 6 years ago for, guess what, Windows XP and 2000. It was never designed for the new redesigned core of Vista and 7. Even less for 64bit. We are lucky enough that it works. Saying XP is dead because you want it to be, doesn't make you very credible. Also you fail to prove why they should invest time into SLI and Crossfire beside that YOU want them to. |
Back to me ORIGINAL post...
If you want SLI, and have nvidia cards, you can use nhancer to override the pre defined profile and enter the hex codes I have given. Depending on your rig, and settings in the game, this will result in a 25-200% increase in fps
Since SLi was first introduced by nVidia withe the 6xxx series, it was certainly designed to handle XP.
The problem is a memory addressable issue and that only recently cropped up when video cards started to have more that 512MB of memory each and more than 2GB of system memory. The issue is 32-bit OS Vs 64-bit OS. It's true that 64-bit XP is the redheaded step child for OS acceptance with very little penetration in the gamer space (0.56%). That changed with Vista and Windows 7. The increase use of 64-bit versions of those two OS chart with the increases in system RAM and >512MB video cards.
There are plenty of people using SLI on 2GB systems with two 512 or 768MB video cards in 32-bit XP. Is that an ideal set up with today's 1GB video cards, no. But three years ago it was.
It sounds like you're someone who spent a lot of money on a high end gamer rig and you simply have to come to grips with the fact that this game's 3D rendering engine isn't written in a way that works well with SLi and Crossfire. Maybe it will one day.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
Quote:
It actually works fine just now. It's just that nvidia won't put out an sli profile. Well they do, but it is set to Single GPU. The gaming community had to come up with settings that work for the game. So my original point is. If the gaming community can come up with a workable SLI profile, why can't nvidia/cox?
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Originally Posted by Father Xmas
Since SLi was first introduced by nVidia withe the 6xxx series, it was certainly designed to handle XP.
The problem is a memory addressable issue and that only recently cropped up when video cards started to have more that 512MB of memory each and more than 2GB of system memory. The issue is 32-bit OS Vs 64-bit OS. It's true that 64-bit XP is the redheaded step child for OS acceptance with very little penetration in the gamer space (0.56%). That changed with Vista and Windows 7. The increase use of 64-bit versions of those two OS chart with the increases in system RAM and >512MB video cards. There are plenty of people using SLI on 2GB systems with two 512 or 768MB video cards in 32-bit XP. Is that an ideal set up with today's 1GB video cards, no. But three years ago it was. It sounds like you're someone who spent a lot of money on a high end gamer rig and you simply have to come to grips with the fact that this game's 3D rendering engine isn't written in a way that works well with SLi and Crossfire. Maybe it will one day. |
Quote:
I think Windows XP users in 2010 feel like Amiga users did in 1998.|
Originally Posted by NobleFox
Yes, it's dead. There's no polite way to say it: anyone who has components made in the last 3 years and is still using XP is either ignorant of what's going on or stubborn to the point of ignoring what's going on aorund them. There are, plainly put, limitations to what XP can DO, and if you've bought a recent computer, XP 32 is foolish. XP 64 even more useless. It doesn't matter that 1 in three people have their craniums buried in their rectums. Technology _has_ to move on.
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Yay! Welcome to the fold.
ElectroHawk: quick response: Hybrid Crossfire and Hybrid SLI
Both Nvidia and AMD have solutions where their main graphics cards can leverage a lesser processor for increase power. While there aren't a lot of SLI / Crossfire systems as we think of them, there is a potentially large market for Hybrid setups.
This actually will be an an even big deal with stuff like AMD Fusion, where the processor will have a graphics chip on die. I know AMD has talked about 2x2 processor and 4x2 processor configurations, where two of the cores are RadeonHD GPUs, and the other 2 or 4 cores are Bulldozer cores.
Personally, I think a bigger focus should be on stuff like OpenCL, which can leverage a GPU core as a processing core. Lets say City Of Heroes swapped out it's existing physics engine for, say OpenCL through Bullet. If you had both an add-in GPU, and an integrated GPU, you could assign the integrated GPU to handle physics calculations, thus freeing up the central processor. This could be really useful right now for many users who might have both an add-in card and an integrated GPU. It would also be useful for CPU+GPU designs that Intel is already shipping, as well as AMD's forthcoming Fusion designs.
My opinion is that there's a large existing market that can leverage hardware-accelerated physics through OpenCL right now, and that market will simply continue to grow. Could I prove it enough to convince the developers they should act on this? Probably not.