Quinn Posted November 3, 2008 Share Posted November 3, 2008 Not wishing to hijack another thread, I have done a small cut-n-paste here In the process of upgrading to a quadcore and GTX280's in SLI, I have seen in other threads references made to a supposed "fact" that FSX does NOT recognise SLI - I am curious as to your feelings regarding this The reason I ask is that on my relatively new machine I am running up against video performance issues due to perhaps a poor decision regarding my video card - I have a Galaxy 9800GTXPlus card that is in itself quite good but with only 512Mb RAM is having difficulties with FTX and before it becomes superceded I was thinking of getting a second one for SLI to double the available RAM Any other comments would also be welcome Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maurice_King Posted November 3, 2008 Share Posted November 3, 2008 About 12 months ago when SLI was in it's infancy and just recently as well with the second generation Mainboards with PCIe SLI configuration, I can honestly say the ONLY graphics orientated Game/Sim that I saw ANY benefit at all in were Medal of Honor Airborne and Crysis. All others were marginal at best and the only way to really tell was flicking between screen captures. In all honesty the expense FAR outweighs the advantage, from what I've seen you would get a better performance from spending the same money on a better Processor-Memory-Main board Combination and couple this with a good graphics Card with Proven driver's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drwalker Posted November 3, 2008 Share Posted November 3, 2008 My understanding is that SLI is hardware based - the software doesn't need to be aware of it. Listen to the gurus tho Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Venema Posted November 3, 2008 Share Posted November 3, 2008 I have 2x 8800GTX's in my laptop which are SLI-capable with the nVidia drivers. I have SLI disabled, since it actually results in worse FPS in FSX. Waste of money I know, but you can't order this model laptop with a single 8800GTX in it, so SLI is disabled full-time and I run a single card only. The only time you would *want* to use SLI is if you have the need for 32x or 64x Anti-Aliasing for uber screenshots. I never need to do that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heiko Glatthorn Posted November 3, 2008 Share Posted November 3, 2008 I have seen in other threads references made to a supposed "fact" that FSX does NOT recognise SLI - I am curious as to your feelings regarding this I would say that the GPU SLI driver doesn't recognize FSX. An application doesn't control SLI at all. But maybe i have no idea about this stuff... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russ White Posted November 3, 2008 Share Posted November 3, 2008 SLI has been around for a LONG time! over a decade in fact! It started as a completely differently termed technology but confusingly had the same acronym. SLI (SCAN-LINE INTERLEAVE) was introduced by the now defuncted company 3DFX as part of their Voodoo2 technology. This system alternated the "scanline" rendering of screen graphics between 2 or more gpu's on seperate cards. Then later NVIDIA designed an SLI system but this time it stands for SCALABLE LINK INTERFACE and is supposed to provide a multi GPU advances by dividing workload etc, NVIDIA has also talked about a 3rd "Physics" calculating card. ATI has introduced the "Cross-Fire" system which is a similar system for the opposition. Now there both trying to out-do each other with "Quad SLI" and "Quad fire" etc etc, dont fall into this marketing trap! The game engine has to be writen to make specific use of a multi GPU setup, and even then there are overheads in processing the split data to overcome. To my mind, it is a waste of money to buy a bit of hardware twice, but only get a maximum of 1.5X the power (at best) and sometimes even worse performance than a solo card. Plus the driver support is all over the place. I am sure that with time, multi GPU systems will prevail, like multi core CPU's have, but i dont think lots of cards is the answer, i think several GPU's on a single card would be the better way to go, to overcome the bridge overheads associated with multiple PCIe cards. Although for this to work, there would need to be a new graphics bus created to handle the throughput....but thats another argument! Short answer, save your money and put it towards a better mother board and/or CPU. Russ. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hotspot Posted November 4, 2008 Share Posted November 4, 2008 I decided to look at SLI performance from both the experiential and theoretical point of view, so after the necessary reading I decided on: a good CPU (Q9550@standard 2.83ghz); an ASUS Striker formula II Mobo which was DOA and replaced with the Nvidia designed nForce 780i SLI FTW board manufactured by Foxcomm but badged eVGA; two XFX GTX280's factory overclocked to 640mhz; four GB of RAM and a 64bit Vista OS. This sits next to my rig in the specs below for comparison. As John mentioned, the SLI function is enabled from the software. It is of course early days and while I haven't yet loaded my ORBX scenery (licences purchased) on the new machine it has been running for about eight hours on the raw FSX and Acceleration, and has given me no reason to think that it is money wasted, as the performance is indeed a step up from my single GTX280, as indicated by the furball tests I've run and the sheer smoothness of the aircraft and graphics. After loading my ORBX scenery I will get down to serious comparison of the two systems, and despite my inexperience may be able to shed some light on bang for buck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gurdy Posted November 4, 2008 Share Posted November 4, 2008 SLI has been around for a LONG time! over a decade in fact! It started as a completely differently termed technology but confusingly had the same acronym. SLI (SCAN-LINE INTERLEAVE) was introduced by the now defuncted company 3DFX as part of their Voodoo2 technology. This system alternated the "scanline" rendering of screen graphics between 2 or more gpu's on seperate cards. Russ. I had 2 3DFX Voodoo2 12MB cards in SLI and it kicked a*se !! .. hehehe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tennyson Posted November 5, 2008 Share Posted November 5, 2008 I think if you try running triple head2go with one video card (as against 2 in SLI) you will notice a difference. I've been running Sli for a good few years and have progressed to two 9800 GX2's. I've also tried running it with just one and it was tragic. For me, there was no contest, I spent the money on 2 cards and have never looked back. Just hanging out for the new mobo and the i7 CPU on order and my two 9800's will be in the new machine as well. Frank Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maurice_King Posted November 5, 2008 Share Posted November 5, 2008 If your already running SLI then the PC isn't gunna give a toss it will just think there is a massive wide monitor attached. depending on the Game / Simulation your running you might have some stretching taking place so be aware of that. Utilize the Matrox Power desk so that you can maximize a window to a particular monitor though otherwise you will got to maximize something like your web browser and it will be across 3 screens. There may be a change in performance but I doubt it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jgruschow Posted November 6, 2008 Share Posted November 6, 2008 I gave a lot of thought about getting SLI. I decided against it, mainly on comments I picked up from other users. General concensus seems to be, "Very little advance on single card performance." I settled on an ASUS TOPO 9800 GTX2 with 1040 megs of ram. This card is in effect two cards joined together and occupying a single slot. It has 2 DVI connectors which enable me to run two monitors. Overall I am quite happy with the performance. Though I am still on the look out for something better Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tennyson Posted November 6, 2008 Share Posted November 6, 2008 Sorry Maurice, But the facts speak for themselves. One card with triple head2 go struggled to maintain decent frame rates. Two cards gave me what I want. Can't argue with the facts, my friend! Frank Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maurice_King Posted November 6, 2008 Share Posted November 6, 2008 Dunno whats the go there Tennyson, your saying that you pulled the a Card out to run the TH2GO ?? OK so why do that I thought your question was will a TH2Go run off a SLI setup and my answer should hold firm and that is yes . the PC should se it as a single monitor 3 times as wide as the original , it sounds as if the SLI can't actually handle the size of the collective screen to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tennyson Posted November 6, 2008 Share Posted November 6, 2008 Sorry, Didn't mean to confuse. What I meant was (forgetting SLI altogether) running FSX on 2 video cards versus 1 card is better (in my opinion) on frame rates on my triple head2go. I know that you can have the two cards in there without running the sli (or having it activated) but not sure why anybody would. Without wanting to hijack this thread any longer, I would also say that the GX2's are basically 2x 8800 ultra GPU's bolted together, so when I fit them to my mobo, in the NVIDIA panel it comes up as Quad SLI (4 times a single 8800 ultra card). I dunno if that is better than two single 280's or 260's running in Dual SLI. Frank Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maurice_King Posted November 6, 2008 Share Posted November 6, 2008 I used to run 4 separate graphics cards 1 AGP and 3 PCI with separate monitors on my old Main board but the new one won't have a bar of multicards for some reason. Some cards may not handle driving the TH2GO and this is where the Matrox compatibility checker comes in, either way round if your system is working for you then that's all that matters. Considering you have either Odd or Even scan lines I doubt whether the Cards you have would work as quad SLI unless there in internal hardware or software application to split off which core processes what scan lines and then recombine tham, this would seem rather counterproductive. Now this of course all hinges on whether the Main board can get the graphics information to the Card/Cards fast enough in the first place. Remember the old adage of the strength of the chain is only as good as the weakest link. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Piotrek_K Posted December 1, 2008 Share Posted December 1, 2008 As said before, you won't probably see any noticable difference in FPS, what I can tell from my point of view (2x 8800 GTS 640), SLI did improved my autogen - no more pop up in front of airplane. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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