Wednesday, July 11th 2018
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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
Btw, the one thing I was hating during my SLI/CF years were the constant stuttering and lag over the single card setup, so no more SLI for me. Ever.
If you said name 10.. well I would have been in a pickle.
I consider myself to be a pragmatist PC gamer. Last year I got a second GTX 960 4GB to SLI with my first one, knowing full well there were issues, but at the same time going out on a limb just to try the technology out. It was an economical choice. I got the second GTX for £110, which gave me performance (in SLI games) similar to a GTX 1060 6GB. Which was what I wanted.
Games I tested it with: The Division, Fallout 4, SW Battlefront, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Battlefield 3 & 4, GTA V, Warhammer Total War & Rise of the Tomb Raider. I also tried to get a few non-SLI titles to work, but results were, at best, horrid.
In general, performance in SLI-enabled games was great. Really really great. Smooth as silk and framerate up the wazoo (in an old rig gaming @1920x1080). I had no issues related to performance. No stuttering, nothing. However, the Nvidia software did require tweaking settings in the games I didn't want SLI to try and do its thing.
Later, I uninstalled card #2 and stuck with just the one. Why? I actually just play one game for extended periods of time, and SLI isn't really doing anything for it (Unity Engine, based, say the developers). I even thought about recording gameplay and tried to get shadowplay to run off the second card, but it always defaults to the one rendering the game. (if anyone knows a workaround, tell me). So there's no real point to having both cards installed.
I'm about to sell both my GTX 960 4GB and the SLI bridge and switch to a single 1060. I pay a little more upfront, sure, but it's a single card, which doesn't steal that much space in my case, draws less power and performs slightly better in all games (rather than just a few choice SLI titles).
I think the 1000-series GTX cards broke the SLI rationale. In the old days you'd have, say, a GTX 460, and when the 560 came out, you'd have some 20%-ish gains. You could buy the new card, or, get a good deal on a second GTX 460 card and set up an SLI rig. With the transition from GTX 900-series to GTX 1000-series, two GTX 960s (4GB!) come in at roughly the same performance as the GTX 1060 (6GB). There's no longer any reason to buy into the tech, and even less if you factor in the lack of AAA titles and the reported bugginess some people claim to experience.
Having said that there is nothing that can fix the game devs attitude to DX12 and mGPU where they have to spend money and resources to get it to work. The game devs were fine with DX11 and mGPU where most of the work to get it to run was done by NVidia and AMD but now that it cost the devs money to get DX12 and mGPU to work it is another matter.
the secret with sli is a simple one.. dont rely on it scaling well all the time.. all my games play nicely at 1440 with a pair of 1070 cards good scaling or not.. they would mostly play nicely with a pair of 1060 cards but nvidia have cleverly removed the fingers so what would be a very nice (and potentially very popular) option dosnt exist any more.. :)
i think a pair of 1070 cards is a sweat spot for sli.. they run nice and cool and have enough grunt to play games nicely even when the sli scaling isnt that good.. sli for sure scales well in all the benchmarks and it could do in all the games if the developers made it so..
for 4K gaming i would say sli is far from dead.. in fact i think its a must.. :)
trog
SLI (and all gaming multi gpu solutions) are dead since it was found that they never match the fluidty of single gpu. Which for me was like 8 years ago.
why did they drop sli support from low and mid cards then? even 1060 is not supporting it?
people that run sli set ups dont fualt it people that dont just copy and post the bullshit they read about it.. he he
i ran 970 sli it ran fine.. i ran 980ti it ran fine but did generate a little too much heat.. i now run 1070 sli.. perfection.. he he
trog
ps.. and i didnt bother forking out for a new bridge.. i use the old one and it works fine.. and to answer an earlier question.. yes it works fine with g-sync..
Efficiency is in such situations different yes. You might consume double the power and get only 15 up to 25% extra in return. But it might be the kick forward to get a fast paste game with all eye candy turned on. I've worked with 3x & 2x CF 580's 8GB for a while, and yes a limited amount of games did actually support it. And thus the extra heat/noise in your case (2x 180w), i ditched the cards after a mining craze and went back to just one card. The input of one card simply feels just that little more solid then 2 or 3 cards in this case.
FPS gamers want speed.
That pissed me off.
1060 SLI would have been fine. Probably too fine and it scared them into killing it off to save higher-end card sales.
Here's a good explenation on why micro stuttering occurs. It's not really a hardware bug, but merely a software one. And in order to get the best out of 2 cards or more, the system needs to be adapted seriously in order to get the best out of it. I always wondered what the effect on stuttering would be when you overclocked the PCI-E bus. I know this sounds stupid, but a videocard is just not always about pure bandwidth. I think the speed from these lanes is a very important factor as well. Nobody ever moved passed the 100Mhz barrier while we see noticable improvement when going from 100 to 112Mhz for example.