Sli?

I am building my first computer ever. So please bear with me.

I want to have 3 monitors setup. The graphics card I was looking at getting only has 2 slots. So I was going to get a second and use them together.

But apparently someone mentioned that SLI does not work with CoH. Is this true?

Can anyone explain it to me with as little technical terminology as possible?


Thank you.

not sure what the general consensus is on that, but I run 2 Nvidia Geforce 8600's Sli. Purrs like a rikti monkey.

I was going to do two nvidia geforce gtx 285s.

Was wondering if that works for coh if its SLI'ed?

I can't see anything going wrong. those are nice cards you're talking about. They should be able to run it without any issues.

then what the heck were my SG mates talk about with CoH not able to use SLI cards... O.o

not sure, maybe it didn't work for them, but from my own experience every day, it works fine.

CoH does not officially support SLI. IT was not program to use it even if the cards can still work. Most people are able to run CoH with SLI without issue. You might have to tweak some settings both in CoH and Nvidia control panel but it should work.

What I meant to say was that having a SLI configuration in itself will not prevent you from playing the game in itself. Forcing the game into SLI might but you'd need to play in the control panel.

Wasn't there some monkeying around by a dev during I17 testing, where he put slifbos 2 into the command line of the launcher shortcut to enable it (on nvidia cards only as I recall). Think it was a post from The Television, if someone wants to flex their search fu muscles and try to track it down.

I think the main goal was ignored... to my knowledge running two video cards in SLI mode will only allow you to run a total of 2 monitors - even though you have 4 connections.

To show what I'm on about, took some pictures:

I have an awful camera phone (it was free okay, I know it's awful) so the real snaps are just plain bad.

I hooked up one my other monitors to my Triple SLI system.



As we can see, i'm in SLI mode so the second monitor is greyed out:




So, disabled SLI and enabled the second monitor:



Now both displays are lit up



Enable SLI again:



Much to my surprise the second monitor stayed turned on:



I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. ATi solved keeping the second monitor on during multi-gpu long ago and Nvidia had to catch up sometime.

If you check the text on the control panel, it does tell you what is going on.




It says:

Quote:

Your NVIDIA GPUs will work together for maximum 3D performance on one display. You may still be able to use additional displays, but they will not have full 3D acceleration.

So I checked by running Heaven 2.1 benchmark in DirectX 10 mode on both monitors:





At this windowed resolution (1280*1024, the maximum resolution of the second monitor), a Geforce GTS 250 is hardly being stressed. Also, I was running it in Windowed mode, not full-screen mode. As best as I can tell with the software I had on hand, I can't tell a full screen 3D application to run on the second monitor. Full-screen 3D applications will only run on the first monitor.

Which leads up to the performance difference between the two.

In windowed mode Heaven 2.1 scored, the GTS 250 scored 1350 points.



Changing nothing but the windowed mode to full screen mode, the score shot up to 1534 points. Sorry, no screenshots. Full screenschots and Heaven 2.1 in full screen mode often make for unstable experience on Nvidia.

I don't know exactly how Nvidia defines the term full 3D Acceleration, or what the actual limits are.

From the short test here, you sacrifice a good bit of potential performance for windowed applications on multi-gpu setups.

I don't get it.

Then how do I get 3 monitors to work and the ability to boot up 3 instances of CoH to log onto 3 different accounts all at the same time?

All 3 can and preferably be in windows mode.


I only need one to be ultra mode but I would like the ability to switch which instance is in ultra mode if I need to.


So how is it that something that seems simple (although for most, not needed) is such a hard time for technology now a days?

1. I dislike ATI. I've had ATI before and they either messed up and have problems within the first few weeks or they die 1 to 2 years in.

I have two computers, 1 is ten years old, the other is 6, and both cards are running strong for what they are.

2. Unless the ATI card are one of these...

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL#ATI

...then its out.


I have specific needs for this computer so options are limited.

speaking of eyeinfinity, anyone running COx with it? right now i have a gtx 285 and am thinking of switching to ATI,The new 6000 series will be announced next month and the
58xx and 59xx should be having some good price drops.