Wednesday, July 11th 2018
An Anthem for SLI: Bioware's New Universe in 60 FPS 4K Run on Two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti GPUs
Lo and Behold: SLI working properly. This was my first reaction whilst reading up on this potential news piece (which, somewhat breaking the fourth wall, actually did end up as one). My thought likely isn't alone; it's been a while since we heard of any relevant dual graphics card configuration and performance improvement now, as developers seem to be throwing dreams of any "Explicit Multi-GPU" tech out of the water. This slight deviation from the news story aside, though: Anthem needed two of the world's fastest GPUs running in tandem to deliver a 4K, 60 FPS experience.Naturally, this doesn't mean that much by now: performance will improve, optimizations will happen - perhaps a watering of the graphics will happen (to be fair, we have seen that before, so the precedent is there). We know that. Still, it does speak volumes that that kind of graphics power was needed. Still, SLI'd GTX 1080Ti graphics cards for 4K and 60 FPS really isn't that extravagant: remember that the Cyberpunk 2077 demo from E3 ran at 1080p on a single such graphics card. Anthem used double the graphics power to push through a fourfold resolution increase - not too shabby. Anthem is just 7 months away (February 22nd) from release, though, while the bets are still off for Cyberpunk 2077. Still, both games look glorious, and Bioware's Anthem really does showcase the Frostbite engine as never seen before. Digital Foundry even seems to think that the showcased demo wasn't running with the full effects galore they observed on their playthroug at E3 - screen-space reflections were absent, for one. It seems the PC version of the game could look even better than what it does right now. Here's to that.
Sources:
TechRadar, Digital Foundry
81 Comments on An Anthem for SLI: Bioware's New Universe in 60 FPS 4K Run on Two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti GPUs
Speaking on watering of graphics, as mentioned in the article: I remember "Maximum PC" magazine doing actual quality comparisons in reviews. The only number that really seemed to matter was the FPS though--people gobble that shit up. Nobody seems to care anymore though.
:toast:
I don't think devs are ignoring it. it's more like expectations changing to the current gaming climate. I do feel console ports play a percentage of that. the time it takes to optimize for sli could be better used in other area's. it certainly doesn't help that we have a mind hive considering "SLI is dead", if the fans think that, pretty sure some devs feel the same way. Personally i'm all for maximizing pc architecture and hardware. Once 4K 144hz and multi-monitor 4k 144hz becomes commonplace. SLI will still have a place for the cutting edge which is a much smaller demographic because of price of entry and majority of players using 1080p \ 1440p screens. What games do you? What's your monitor setup look like?
Nvidia has a more in-depth description for those interested: developer.nvidia.com/explicit-multi-gpu-programming-directx-12 1440P is great and the best middle ground we have, but 4K is still the next gen. Today's trend is basically reminiscent of 1024x768 Monitors which were more common than 1080P or 1200P during that time. People said the same thing about 1080P, look where we're at now...
I'm using 1070 SLI on two systems, 1070Ti SLI on one, 1080 SLI on one, and a single 1080Ti on the last one.
All of the PCs are pretty fast CPUs with at least 32GB of RAM and SSD's for the OS.
We're having some fun LAN games here with the grandkids.
I'm hedging my bet with SLI. It may not be as relevant as it used to be, but I do see better performance with it. So I use it.
I've used sli and CF and the microstutter, ohh my god it's terrible.
Last sli was with maxwell and last CF was 6970's.
yay I have 200fps, still feels worse than 80fps...
neither vendor seems to be able to do anything about it.
2160p/144htz is coming, good luck trying to get that to run on a single GPU.
Not even a Titan V is up to the job.