SLI config

Mikor

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any one got or tried runing doac with 2 sli compatable gfx cards does it immprove the performance alot some sites i seen say you can in some games see performance double ?
 

Saggy

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DAoC likes CPU more than GPU so no, you wont see that big performance difference.
 

Void959

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Agrd, you'll probably see almost no increase in DAOC, unless you're running five CPUs or something, and measuring '000 fps'.
 

UndyingAngel

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tbh I run 2 clients on my PC in windows mode with everything turned on with AAx4 and I have no probelms :)
 

Brunore

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He means the newer nVidia cards that can be run in SLi not duel cpus.

As far as I know the games have to have code in them to make them SLi aware, so no its wont.

And DAoC like more RAM than anything.

I got 1.5GB of RAM and I get no lag at all other than the usual shitty GOA provider.
 

Saggy

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Brunore said:
He means the newer nVidia cards that can be run in SLi not duel cpus.

As far as I know the games have to have code in them to make them SLi aware, so no its wont.
You can see performance difference in any game if you run 2x6600GT against 1x6600GT - in DAoC's case the difference wont be that big (noticeable at 1600x1200 though). The better your cards are the less benefits you get out of them in the current games.
 

Quinlan

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Saggy said:
You can see performance difference in any game if you run 2x6600GT against 1x6600GT - in DAoC's case the difference wont be that big (noticeable at 1600x1200 though). The better your cards are the less benefits you get out of them in the current games.

You can compare it relativly easy. If you have a new motherboard which supports 2 video cards one builds the lower part of the screen the other one the upper.

Ofcourse technically it aint that simple but for comparison reasons it is.
 

Danya

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Brunore said:
He means the newer nVidia cards that can be run in SLi not duel cpus.

As far as I know the games have to have code in them to make them SLi aware, so no its wont.
No, they don't need to be SLi aware. It does help if the nvidia driver is aware of the game though.

I don't have a daoc account or I'd try SLi vs not and find out if it's any better. :p
 

Crookshanks

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Danya said:
No, they don't need to be SLi aware. It does help if the nvidia driver is aware of the game though.

No - I don't think this is correct unless numerous sites and magazine reviews are wrong - nvidia MUST know about the game and add it to its driver or there will be absolutely no speed improvment whatsoever as the game will just use the one card - see:

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzEx

In fact - as a SLI configuration drops the number of PCI-E channels to each card from 16 (in a single card machine) to 8 on each - you might even find a slight decrease in performance (although tests seem to indicate that its hardly a noticable drop with any current game).


I agree with the above comments though - DAOC is largely CPU (and memory) constrained - not graphics.
 

Saggy

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Quinlan said:
You can compare it relativly easy. If you have a new motherboard which supports 2 video cards one builds the lower part of the screen the other one the upper.

Ofcourse technically it aint that simple but for comparison reasons it is.
In theory it should double the performance difference but in practice it doesn't and usually its far far away from it.
 

Danya

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Crookshanks said:
No - I don't think this is correct unless numerous sites and magazine reviews are wrong - nvidia MUST know about the game and add it to its driver or there will be absolutely no speed improvment whatsoever as the game will just use the one card - see:

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzEx

In fact - as a SLI configuration drops the number of PCI-E channels to each card from 16 (in a single card machine) to 8 on each - you might even find a slight decrease in performance (although tests seem to indicate that its hardly a noticable drop with any current game).


I agree with the above comments though - DAOC is largely CPU (and memory) constrained - not graphics.
You can force SLi on in the driver (details are in fact in that hardocp article). What you said was true for some very early drivers, but the more recent versions allow you to force any game to use SLi. It's not always beneficial to do so though.
 

Void959

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Brunore said:
He means the newer nVidia cards that can be run in SLi not duel cpus.

I know that ;)

What I was pointing out was that DAOC is so very CPU limited that you'd need the equivalent of a 10ghz processor before a decent graphcs card came into its own.

Of course, what I and probably eveyone else here didn't take into account was the client version, apparently catacombs is much more efficiant, and uses the GPU alot more, so you might see more of a change when running that, particularly at higher resolutions. I still can't help thinking that the CPU will be the bottleneck though.


And I'm fairly certain that the games don't need to support SLI for the benefits to work, I've seen benchmarks on older games somewhere, can't remeber where.
 

Danya

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Just checked the latest official drivers (71.84), TOA has SLi support in them.
 

Honza

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Afaic with decent CPU (3GHz + Intel or 3200+ PR AMD) 1GB fast RAM (that means Corsairs or other high end) and THEN with SLI GeForce you will see performance increase for 25% at least (the stronger CPU and faster RAM enhances boost limits very much)
 

Danya

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The difference between high end ram and low end ram in games is typically 1-3%, CPU will make a significant difference, as will the amount of RAM. Not sure on SLi vs normal as I don't have an account to test with, however given it's an AFR (alternate frame rendering) profile for toa the difference could be large. You'd likely need to be running high res with AA/AF on to see any difference though.
 

Saggy

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Danya said:
The difference between high end ram and low end ram in games is typically 1-3%, CPU will make a significant difference, as will the amount of RAM. Not sure on SLi vs normal as I don't have an account to test with, however given it's an AFR (alternate frame rendering) profile for toa the difference could be large. You'd likely need to be running high res with AA/AF on to see any difference though.
If the low end ram can't run @ 1t the performance difference will be huuuuuge on A64 :p I was about to get 2GB of ram but A64 can't handle more than 1GB @ 1t so I forgot about it :cool:
 

Danya

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Might want to read this: http://www.mushkin.com/mushkin/pop-up/latencies.htm
Basically any ram can run 1T as long as the chipset is good enough.

In particular:
Overall, rating a module as 1T is either false advertising or needs to be excused as blatant ignorance as all unbuffered modules are capable of a 1T CMD rate up to four banks per channel, beyond which chipset limitations come into play
 

Saggy

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Danya said:
Might want to read this: http://www.mushkin.com/mushkin/pop-up/latencies.htm
Basically any ram can run 1T as long as the chipset is good enough.
Low end ram seems to have problems to run at 1T in Dual Channel and its the CPU that determines it in A64's case (if I'm not mistaken?), not the MB's chipset if that was your point - 333DDR 1:1 @ 1T is faster than 400DDR 1:1 @ 2T. Test it by yourself :cool: Done plenty of testing with DFI SLI-D, A64, Winbond UTT / cheap Kingston and the difference between 1T and 2T was something stupid (more than two modules -> 2T, Kingston in DC -> 2T) :p
 

Honza

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Danya said:
The difference between high end ram and low end ram in games is typically 1-3%, CPU will make a significant difference, as will the amount of RAM. Not sure on SLi vs normal as I don't have an account to test with, however given it's an AFR (alternate frame rendering) profile for toa the difference could be large. You'd likely need to be running high res with AA/AF on to see any difference though.

Lol, maybe with ordinary games. BUT no card except GF6800 Ultra with 512 MB RAM is capable to store all the textures (and models too maybe) in graphic card memory. There you gain huge advantage when you start to download these stuff through AGP/PCI-E16 from main RAM... so when comes time for huge zerg you start getting lags much much faster for low-end RAM than for high-end one. I've been testing this... originaly had T3 512M RAM, switched it with better RAM T2. The difference is significant.. in my case it was in matter of 1-2 SECONDS when the texturation shown up (the larger zerg the bigger the reaction difference between slow and fast RAM)... Unfortunately if you don't have enough RAM to store everything needed in it, fast RAM won't save you.
 

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