Issue 19 Teaser: Sli Mentioned

Just how much benefit does multi-GPU/SLI give this game? I've been playing on a Radeon HD 5770 that I picked up some months back and don't really notice any problems.

Forceware 260.89 for nvida says...
NVIDIA SLI

* Adds or enhances SLI profiles for the following PC games:
o City of Heroes: Going Rogue
o Alien Swarm
o Dead Rising 2
o Front Mission Evolved
o Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days
o LEGO: Harry Potter

In the change notes. I'd say that's a decent sign.

Any news on Crossfire??? I have a 5870 2gb waiting for a partner...

Someone please do a benchmark. I'd like to see if there's more than a 50% improvement over one card. As much as I think SLI is a gimmick, I'd still like to see SLI be supported on more MMOs.





Oh and when is CoH Physx going to switch from Ageia to Nvidia? Seriously.

Let me put some things into perspective about PhysX.

First, je_saist really needs a tin foil hat when it comes to anything nVidia.

Second, nVidia didn't do anything to make the software emulation any slower than it initially was. Ageia gave away their software development kit so their only source of income was selling the PhysX chip to hardware manufactures. If you are trying to sell hardware, you don't spend too much time optimizing your software emulator. On top of that multiple core CPUs were just starting to become mainstream so doing a multithreaded emulator wouldn't have been a good use of their time.

However I do agree that sometime in the future, someone will offer a physics engine that is based in OpenCL or DirectCompute or Microsoft simply rolls one themselves and includes it into DirectX so all GPUs can take advantage of hardware accelerated physics. But physics still a novelty that few games take advantage of. Until it becomes something more than a way to track debris from things that go boom or realistic waving flags or knocking over piles of boxes, its development will sit on someone's back burner and its widespread adoption will be something way in the future.

If you've got an SLI set up in your system, you can try it out right now by downloading the latest drivers from Nvidia's website.

Nvidia re-enabled multi-GPU driver support for CoH as of the 260.63 beta driver set about a month ago. As of this morning, they've released the WHQL version of the 260 driver set (version 260.89), which re-enables multi-GPU rendering for City of Heroes via forced alternate frame rendering. Nvidia generally applies this setting to their drivers when the application itself does not actually support SLI.

(True SLI is actually adaptive, with the secondary GPUs kicking in only when needed as opposed to the forced alternate frame rendering which keeps both GPUs running at exactly the same rate all the time, so this isn't exactly proper SLI, but this provides a huge boost in performance for those who've got multiple Nvidia GPUs in their system.)

With the release of issue 19, we'll hopefully see Nvidia update their drivers again to enable true SLI support once again, which should boost performance even further for CoH.

I can confirm that SLI seems to be working (for me at least on test) already, as of the driver update on my second machine, 2 GTS 250s almost equals my GTX 470 in the main machine now...lacking maybe 5fps, which could easily be the cpu and/or board of the older machine.

Confirmed too, SLi is now working, installed the new drivers to have CoH stick itself on AFR2! Whoop!

Just out of curiosity, what cards are you running? I know someone with a pair of 470s who is having massive tearing and ripping (way beyond what is normal "vsynch" tear. So bad the power tray sometimes "jumps" to the opposite corner of the screen and back. We think it's her SLI bridge, but I'm also wondering if newer cards have support issues until i19 actually releases?