Brand new, 670 x 2 SLI

dannydigital

Honorable
Jun 10, 2012
9
0
10,510
Hey whats up guys, im brand new to this site/forum, but im looking forward to joining in as this seems like a very helpful and knowledgeable group of people.
I just got into the whole custom PC seen a few weeks ago, switching from an xbox 360, mainly so I could play BF3 and D3 when they came out.......Im really liking my computer so far and everyday it seems like im going somewhere to find and buy new things for it, Im always customizing everything. I got a Phantom 410 case, 3770k, msi GD-55 mainboard, 16gb 1600mhz corsair vengeance ram, coolermaster hyper 612 cpu cooler, antec 750 psu, 120 gb corsair force GT SSD. 1 TB WD 7,200 hard-drive, and last but not least 2 msi geforce GTX 670's OC edition. I had a lot of trouble SLI'ing these as the benchmarking programs that came with the msi mainboard would not recognize the 2nd GPU....i had to do a lot of researching before i could come up with an answer, when i first installed the 2nd gpu it wouldn't even put any load on to the 2nd gpu. Now i think i got it all up and running, i have the SLI indicator on in the nvidia control panel, and it showing both cards have around 90% load, which i think is normal. Anyways, on to the question.

Is there any tips or any general things i should know about SLI? Settings in Nvidia control panel, settings in games, over clocking the cards via afterburner utility, and especially your guys setup's, like what kind of settings/ cards are you running and what basically you did to improve performance. Any and all tips and experiences would be greatly appreciated, my setup/ pic of my rig is my avatar. Thanks in advance, im looking forward to becoming a contributing member and to gain valuable info about custom gaming rigs, custom modifications, and gaming rigs.

Daniel (DannyDigital)
 
When a game does not support SLi, it is best to set it up in the Nvidia CP to only use a single GPU and set the 2nd card to do all the antialiasing, giving the single card great performance.
This is also known as SLi antialising.
Flat Wrong, there's no dedicated card can be assigned to do the AA, AA has to be handled by the card doing the rendering.
And since the 2 cards of share the workload so both cards do the rendering and improve the AA mode.
SLI Antialiasing is a new standalone SLI rendering mode that offers up to double the antialiasing performance by splitting the antialiasing workload between the two graphics cards.
For those interested in such a setting, there is also SLI Anti-Aliasing. While not an actual rendering mode, this is an Anti-Aliasing setting exclusive to SLI configurations. SLI Anti-Aliasing, otherwise known as SLIAA, takes advantage of the presence of the two processors by splitting the Anti-Aliasing workload on both processors rather than one alone. The lowest setting is SLI8x, allocating a 4x process to each GPU. Most users can enable SLI16x which forces an 8xS process over each GPU, though this setting does come with a high performance hit. For the lucky few who have (working) Quad-SLI, they have the option to enable SLI32x, though it too forces an 8xS AA process to each video processor like SLI16x does. Enabling SLIAA will turn off SLI however, so it is important to keep this in mind.
So basically enabling the SLI AA you can expect the performance to stay the same as a single card, but the AA quality to be much higher

Check your info =)
 
@Daniel
It's simply easy, it will just require you more time to read and understand every setting before selecting it .

You can read about the overall graphics settings that's supported by both AMD and nvidia from this guide, it will indicate the definition of the most every technology supported by the game such as Aniti-Aliasing, Antistropic Filter(AF), Refresh Rate, V-Sync, Triple Buffering and so on....
http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_1.html

And here's some general settings you can use in your nVidia Control Panel for optimal gaming experience and results;
Ambient Occlusion Quality
Anisotropic filtering 16x
Antialiasing FXAA On
Antialiasing gamma correction On
Antialiasing Mode Application-controlled
Antialiasing Transparency 2x Super Sampling
CUDA GPU's All
Maximum prerendered frames Application controlled
Power management mode Adaptive
Texture filtering aniso Off
Texture filtering negative LOD Clamp Allow
Texture filtering quality High quality
Texture filtering trilinear On
Threaded optimization Auto
Triple buffering on
Vsync On (in case you encounter screen tearing or you can use the new Adaptive V-Sync mode)

Also, you can go geforce website, they made a great tweaking guide regarding every high end game around, you just select your card and see the optimal playable settings for your game.
http://www.geforce.com/optimize

EDIT: What's your monitor resolution? If you're gaming at 1080p you can turn everything on high for almost every game.
 

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