City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Is CoX fully capable of SLI or Xfire

Addicted

By Addicted,
Posted on: 2011-01-27 21:50 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs

 

Posted

A friend of mine is getting a new "Sandy rig" and regardless of CoX performance it will have SLI. I'm curious if the latest updates to City will allow any benefit for one of his favorite games. What evidence is there that CoX is or isn't capable of this technology?

Thanks in advance.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Addicted View Post
A friend of mine is getting a new "Sandy rig" and regardless of CoX performance it will have SLI. I'm curious if the latest updates to City will allow any benefit for one of his favorite games. What evidence is there that CoX is or isn't capable of this technology?

Thanks in advance.
Yes it is capable of benefiting from SLI.

HOWEVER, the performance difference for CoH is relatively small between single and dual cards. You aren't really going to be cranking resolution much, but you'll be able to turn up some of your other effects without seeing as massive a performance hit.

Keep in mind that SLI (nVidia's Scalable Link Interface) didn't exist (save maybe as schematics and some firmware/software proofs) during the development phase of CoH.


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Posted

From what I understand, "not really."

Some people seem to see a very slight boost in performance, on the order of a few FPS, from what I've read and heard through the grapevine.

But again, my understanding is that the game isn't designed or optimized for either.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Zombie Man View Post
The Television... GIVE ME CROSSFIRE!

pretty please?
+1. Would like *some* information about crossfire support. Whether it is "we are working on it but it is backburner" type of thing or "forget it, it's too small of a market" that would be better than hanging onto a useless feature.

Was hoping for eyefinity and crossfire support when the AMD/ATi sponsorship thing was announced, but looks like I got suckered.

Went AMD (5970) for this game (don't play any others) but if nothing is forthcoming when my GPU upgrade cycle comes around again, it will be a once burned twice shy thing for me and I will be back to Nvidia permanently.

Currently eyeing up Dual GTX580s but maybe The Television can convince me otherwise. Only thing is that the 1.5GB seems a bit constrained...would be nice to have 2GB+ per GPU.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by PumBumbler View Post
+1. Would like *some* information about crossfire support. Whether it is "we are working on it but it is backburner" type of thing or "forget it, it's too small of a market" that would be better than hanging onto a useless feature.
The best we got was a comment that he couldn't talk about it. Which means something is in the works... for good or ill.

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Posted

Multi-GPU rendering is largely handled by the graphics DRIVER and not by the game itself. Both Nvidia and AMD support a long list of games that benefit from multi-gpu acceleration even though the developers of those games have done absolutely nothing to the game engine or final binary client to enable multi-gpu support.

Yes, game developers can make some optimizations for their games to leverage multi-gpu setups, but such optimizations are not, by any means, required for multi-gpu acceleration.

Nvidia

Now, as to why Multi-GPU hasn't been supported in the past by Nvidia... nobody knows. Nvidia was pretty quick in enabling Multi-GPU for ID-Software's OpenGL based rendering engines. In fact, Nvidia actually worked with ID-Software to create proprietary OpenGL extensions such as UltraShadow. Nvidia also helped write the underpinnings of CoH's original graphics technology, again utilizing proprietary OpenGL extensions.

Currently Nvidia has enabled SLI support for the City of Heroes executable. As already mentioned there is no gigantic performance boost from running an SLI setup.
AMD
Multi-GPU hasn't been supported in the past by ATi/AMD as the old graphics engine was essentially broken in regards to ATi/AMD hardware. Little reason to enable multiple GPU support on City of Heroes if everybody who has multiple GPU support can't run with high quality water and other rendering issues.

Multi-GPU isn't supported currently by ATi/AMD for a couple of reasons. While AMD helped write a new graphics engine that is adherent to OpenGL 3.x targets... and while AMD's single card OpenGL performance is adequate... AMD's multi-card OpenGL performance is downright abysmal.

The reality for ATi/AMD is that most of the OpenGL based games to hit the market in the past 6, 7, 8 or so years leveraged proprietary OpenGL extensions designed to make games run better on Nvidia hardware (Nvidia's "The way it's meant to be code sabotaged" program). For the most part ATi/AMD didn't have much of a market incentive to write a performance Fast / Single Pass OpenGL driver that leveraged multiple GPU's outside of the Linux gamer market.
Now, OpenGL itself is having a bit of a revival. The API is the only way to get graphics acceleration on mobile platforms such as Apple IOS and Google Android. Two of gaming's biggest juggernauts, Nintendo and Sony, also are using OpenGL as the rendering API in their next generation handhelds, Nintendo 3DS and Sony NGP. One of the largest standouts of the PC publishing / development crowd, Valve Software, is also turning to OpenGL as a rendering API solution.

Whether or not renewed developer interest in OpenGL will be enough of a pitchfork for AMD to get off it's collective rump and get a proper performance driver for Multi-gpu rendering out the door... nobody really knows yet.