First impressions of SLI: pretty crappy

[flossbandit]

I just got my second GTX 560 TI in today. It was pretty easy to install and showed up immediately.

First thing I did was open up Crysis. Yep, 2007's Crysis. I thought, "Let's max this bitch out."

Nerp. Didn't happen. I had to lower the settings to high with no AA just to get the standard 60fps. Now I know it's a pretty demanding game, that's why I tested it out, but the improvement in performance wasn't a great leap from the single. The game's 5 years old.

I opened up BF3. Started out in ultra, and bumped the settings down to a mix of med, high and ultra. Even then the fps were sporadic at best and would sit at 60, then on a quick turn they'd drop to somewhere in the 30's. Ended up only having slightly higher results than with only 1 card.

Oh yeah, and the GPUs are twice as loud now... and noticeable during games. I've been running a few benchmarks, 3DMark11 and Furmark. Both show almost a 2x increase in performance (as far as numbers go) but the temps were pretty nuts. I've never seen my single card go over 84° C. As soon as I launched Furmark I heard a cricket-like noise that lasted during the entire 15 minute test. By the end, GPU 1 touched 96° C and 2 sat in the 80's. Global V-sync's on so I highly doubt the sound was coming from the PSU.

So yeah, not very impressed. I installed this thing like it was Christmas, but now it's just... whatever. I dropped another $250 on this one, and I refuse to be one of those people who RMA's something when there's nothing wrong with it.

So if I could do it all again would I just get a 580? Definitely.

 

[flossbandit]

Sounds like you need some more case ventilation.

Also, disable vsync... dunno why you're surprised at random frame drops into the 30s when you have vsync enabled.

Annnnnnnnnd yeah I dunno if there's anything that gets a rock solid 60fps in Crysis at 1080p with 4xAA or higher... maybe GTX 580 SLI or 7950/7970 crossfire would do it, but 560ti SLI is nowhere near enough GPU muscle to achieve minimum framerates of 60 in that game... it's one of the worst optimized games in existence on top of being very demanding.

i5 2500k. Can't see it bottlenecking with that.

It's a mATX board, so I can see that being a problem with the venation. However my case does have a mesh front and side panel and i've counted up a total of 13 fans including GPUs and PSU.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Can ya match this:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-560-ti-sli-review/7

If not, sounds like problem is specific to your box.

My son is running twin factory overclocked (900MHz) 560 Ti's (2600k @ 4.8GHz, CAS 7 DDR3-1600) that we OC'd to 1020 MHz and then later dropped down to 980 Mhz to keep temps below 80C w/ all case fans at slowest possible speed. Having machine run silent was a higher priority than those last few fps. Case is a DF-85 w/ CP-850

Ya didn't say which 560 Ti's ya used but given the $250 price, I hope they were factory overclocked jobs with HUGE cooler sand beefed up VRMs....900Mhz ones w/ 7 phase VRMs are generally about $205 - $230 and they will run a lot quieter and cooler than designs based upon the reference PCB.

He plays BF3 on Ultra settings in single player mode, runs smooth. Multi-player mode he drops to High

 

[bystander]

Rather than saying Crysis was optimized like garbage or horribly optimized, you could just as easily say the game was never meant to be played with every setting maxed. The game just put everything available at the time in the game and let use adjust the settings to self optimize the game.

I realize that a lot of people feel that all games are meant to be maxed, but that's not true. One thing I've seen more of lately is games that have all the settings that Crysis has, if not more, which in no way shape or form could be maxed, but they have predefined setups that will say low, med, high, ultra (Rift is a good example). This seems to satisfy the people who feel all games should be maxed, or it's garbage, yet still allow people to tweak into the unreasonable.

 

[razor512]

For crysis, did you run GPU-Z to check and see if the GPU usage was actually hit in 100%, or if one of the CPU cores were acting as a bottleneck?


with benchmarks, modern cards will show 80-90% performance boost from SLI but in real workd gaming, it goes down to around 60-70% performance boost, with a few games that are heavily optimized, getting over 80% extra performance.

PS for SLI, you need a front case fan with airflow aimed directly at the videocards, you need a rush of air blowing between the cards as the back of the videocards also get very hot and will cause the GPU with it's vent very close to the other card to suck in pre heated air.

To fix this, make sure you have a case fan blowing air directly at/ between the cards. (if you have a vent for a side panel fan and it is in a position to blow on both cards and get some air in between then then that will also be good)


PS the i5 2500k does bottleneck if not overclocked

PS With case fans it is very important to avoid air streams fighting each other, eg 2 perpendicular fans will have greatly reduced performance past the area where the streams intersect.

Which is why with many cases, people try to have a single overall direction of airflow, eg most of the air coming in to the front and leaving from the back or the top, or some of both, or most of the air coming in from the side and leaving through the top and back.

 

[Rockdpm]

Hey bro, guess what?, i have the same issue, except i am using a AMD FX 6100. and the funny thing is. its only BF3 i have tried but i get same case senario. shoot i have even set everything to low. but not takes a tump right in the 30's even with 1 GTX 560 ti. I won't be doing SLI. obviously it has some issues with that new driver. I am gonna get a Kepler card when they are released but my buddy told me it has to do something with the Texture Fill Rate.

 

[terryd75]

I just got my second GTX 560 TI in today. It was pretty easy to install and showed up immediately.

First thing I did was open up Crysis. Yep, 2007's Crysis. I thought, "Let's max this bitch out."

Nerp. Didn't happen. I had to lower the settings to high with no AA just to get the standard 60fps. Now I know it's a pretty demanding game, that's why I tested it out, but the improvement in performance wasn't a great leap from the single. The game's 5 years old.

I opened up BF3. Started out in ultra, and bumped the settings down to a mix of med, high and ultra. Even then the fps were sporadic at best and would sit at 60, then on a quick turn they'd drop to somewhere in the 30's. Ended up only having slightly higher results than with only 1 card.

Oh yeah, and the GPUs are twice as loud now... and noticeable during games. I've been running a few benchmarks, 3DMark11 and Furmark. Both show almost a 2x increase in performance (as far as numbers go) but the temps were pretty nuts. I've never seen my single card go over 84° C. As soon as I launched Furmark I heard a cricket-like noise that lasted during the entire 15 minute test. By the end, GPU 1 touched 96° C and 2 sat in the 80's. Global V-sync's on so I highly doubt the sound was coming from the PSU.

So yeah, not very impressed. I installed this thing like it was Christmas, but now it's just... whatever. I dropped another $250 on this one, and I refuse to be one of those people who RMA's something when there's nothing wrong with it.

So if I could do it all again would I just get a 580? Definitely.

I agree with floss bandit. SLI isn't enough of a gain i performance to justify the crazy cost. I have sli set up and am seeing performance that could be achieved with a single card. My advice.......Just like he said.....get the 580 and be done.

 

[bystander]

Crysis has an insane memory leak during the last level/boss where my FPS would nosedive from 50 to about 4 and then back, constantly. It's not a well optimized game, at all. Why bother defending it? This is pretty common knowledge...

Just because people say it's badly optimized, doesn't mean they are right. There are plenty of people who view Crysis as I do too. It really is all about how you view things. I prefer to have the settings available to make a game look better over the years rather than having a game which will look good when it's released, but will look awful in a few years.

You seem to view an optimized game as a game that removes all high end settings that hurt performance too much. Then again, I think it was great to be "optimized like garbage", because it has allowed is to keep tweaking settings higher and higher for better and better visuals years after it was released.

That said, I am aware of the aircraft carrier memory leak, actually, I believe there is a small memory leak throughout the game, it's just the aircraft carrier was horrible. I would call that a bug rather an optimized thing.

 

[cbrunnem]

Sounds like you need some more case ventilation.

Also, disable vsync... dunno why you're surprised at random frame drops into the 30s when you have vsync enabled.

Annnnnnnnnd yeah I dunno if there's anything that gets a rock solid 60fps in Crysis at 1080p with 4xAA or higher... maybe GTX 580 SLI or 7950/7970 crossfire would do it, but 560ti SLI is nowhere near enough GPU muscle to achieve minimum framerates of 60 in that game... it's one of the worst optimized games in existence on top of being very demanding.

like previous people have said, just cause you can max it doesnt mean its poorly optimized. is bf3 badly optimized because a 7970 barely maxes it at 1080p?

Can ya match this:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/gefo [...] i-review/7

If not, sounds like problem is specific to your box.

exactly... maxed out, 560ti SLI doesn't even get you 60fps average in maxed out 1080p Crysis

It's playable and pretty smooth but nowhere near being able to just vsync it and sit at 60fps for the whole game.

those fps are relative to maxing out crysis. they had lower then maxed settings in their tests.

Hey bro, guess what?, i have the same issue, except i am using a AMD FX 6100. and the funny thing is. its only BF3 i have tried but i get same case senario. shoot i have even set everything to low. but not takes a tump right in the 30's even with 1 GTX 560 ti. I won't be doing SLI. obviously it has some issues with that new driver. I am gonna get a Kepler card when they are released but my buddy told me it has to do something with the Texture Fill Rate.

thats because your cpu cant keep up.

Crysis has an insane memory leak during the last level/boss where my FPS would nosedive from 50 to about 4 and then back, constantly. It's not a well optimized game, at all. Why bother defending it? This is pretty common knowledge...

its not common knowledge. idk where you got that idea.

 

[flossbandit]

Can ya match this:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-560-ti-sli-review/7

If not, sounds like problem is specific to your box.

My son is running twin factory overclocked (900MHz) 560 Ti's (2600k @ 4.8GHz, CAS 7 DDR3-1600) that we OC'd to 1020 MHz and then later dropped down to 980 Mhz to keep temps below 80C w/ all case fans at slowest possible speed. Having machine run silent was a higher priority than those last few fps. Case is a DF-85 w/ CP-850

Ya didn't say which 560 Ti's ya used but given the $250 price, I hope they were factory overclocked jobs with HUGE cooler sand beefed up VRMs....900Mhz ones w/ 7 phase VRMs are generally about $205 - $230 and they will run a lot quieter and cooler than designs based upon the reference PCB.

He plays BF3 on Ultra settings in single player mode, runs smooth. Multi-player mode he drops to High

two of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130651&Tpk=01G-P3-1567-KR

I made a thread before I actually ordered it if I should have gotten the single fan version or another one with 2 like this. I was told it wouldn't make any difference, but now that I actually see/hear it, it may have been a better choice to have used the single fan as a top card because there was more ventilation out of the back rather than down in the case.

Here's the other one I was looking at:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130610

 

[bystander]

w/e... there are games that look better than Crysis and run like twice as smoothly and have no memory leaks

IMO that's about the textbook definition of a game optimized like crap, but if you wanna sugarcoat that fact then go right ahead.

Yes, there are, but it took several years before that happened and you still see a lot of people who still believe Crysis looks better than anything still (I don't necessarily agree though). They were the first to many of the things they did, and others took that idea and improved it. I'm not going to tell the Wright brothers that their planes were crap, they brought a new technology to the forefront and people after them improved them.

I personally wished Crytec would have done the same thing with Crysis 2 as they did with Farcry and Crysis, but unfortunately, too many people kept being upset they couldn't max those games at release. Instead we get a good game out of Crysis 2, but it is not cutting edge, but at least they released the DX11 patch, which is kind of a compromise.

 

[bystander]

I'm not picking on Crysis for being un-maxable in 2007... that doesn't really bear on a discussion of optimization one way or another

I'm picking on Crysis for not running nearly as well as better looking games 5 years later in 2012

In many ways, Crysis is still the best looking game. I find that rather weird, cutting on a game that doesn't perform/look as good as a game 5 years after it was made. They had no idea what hardware could do today, they also pioneered a lot of techniques which have later been improved on. Like I said earlier, it's like calling the Wright brothers planes, crap, because today they are much better.

 

[cbrunnem]

I'm not picking on Crysis for being un-maxable in 2007... that doesn't really bear on a discussion of optimization one way or another

I'm picking on Crysis for not running nearly as well as better looking games 5 years later in 2012

just to throw this out there but new cards(7000 series) cant play dx9 games worth a *** so it might not just be the game.

 

[cbrunnem]

point taken but maxed Crysis is dx10

whats the difference between dx10 and 9....? As far as i know its essentially the same thing but with some updates.

but the point still stand regardless in my opinion.

also BF3 developers could have made the objects and textures have twice the polys and pixels and then no card on the market could max the game. at that point is bf3 a badly optimized game? my point i guess im getting at is no one knows why its hard to max. a lot think its because of how high the highest graphics settings are and others think its because of poor optimization. i believe the first.

 

[bystander]

The biggest thing that hurts Crysis performance, beyond all the new shadowing effects is the jungle. That game has a huge clipping range with thousands of trees to render. While new games often meet the appearance of Crysis, none have attempted to render so much at once. I believe the jungle is also why many people still think it's one of the best if not the best looking game today.

 

[Guest]

FlossBandit, did you notice any perceivable input lag going from one card to sli? Any delay in mouse/keyboard input, even ever so slighty?

 

[monsta]

Best way to play BF3 with the 560ti SLI set up for me is , I set everything to Ultra settings and turn off motion blur and AA, the game runs really well and I get good fps and I'm running an older system than yours.
Have you got the latest drivers from Nvidia?
Have you set your gaming profile in the Nvidia Control panel to BF3?
Are you running MSI Afterburner to adjust your fan speed to reduce the temps?
Can you fit any more fans to your case?
Turn off V sync?

 

[ihatehismap]

I cant tell what is wrong with your system but what i do know is that 2 560 ti's is better than a 580.

 

[esrever]

Crysis at max settings was never designed to be optimized. They didn't even bother to make it runable so it was just there for show. Im not sure why people still think crysis is optimized when it was know to be a messy game from the start. It looked good and did a lot of things with the engine but the implementations were all just there for show.

Crytec basically did the same with Crysis 2 with absurd amount of tessellation and above ground ocean to make the game harder to run but not give better quality.

 

[bystander]

Actually on my playthrough it was NPC enemies that had the biggest effect on performance (outside of memory leaks)... just displaying the jungle resulted in 50-70fps but if there were 1-2 dozen enemies loaded in the area the fps could sit at times around 30

For me, anytime I looked across large landscapes, my FPS would drop. Like when you first come up to the bay at the start, and look across the water, FPS always takes a nose dive.

 

[flossbandit]

FlossBandit, did you notice any perceivable input lag going from one card to sli? Any delay in mouse/keyboard input, even ever so slighty?

Nope. None whatsoever.

Best way to play BF3 with the 560ti SLI set up for me is , I set everything to Ultra settings and turn off motion blur and AA, the game runs really well and I get good fps and I'm running an older system than yours.
Have you got the latest drivers from Nvidia?
Have you set your gaming profile in the Nvidia Control panel to BF3?
Are you running MSI Afterburner to adjust your fan speed to reduce the temps?
Can you fit any more fans to your case?
Turn off V sync?

1)yep
2)nope. it's all default, which shouldn't be any higher than the in game settings.
3)afterburn? no, i just let the fans automatically do their thing. maybe i should look into this.
4)perhaps. i'd have to mount it in unconventional ways though. another one would be number 14 plus.
5)v-sync's on. i'll probably keep it that way unless i see some significant performance improvement or if the temps drop a whole lot. i really don't understand why v-sync gets so much hate from a lot of gamers. it makes most games look way better on a quick turn. a lot less vertical lines and tearing in the picture.

 

[Guest]

Even with a single card in BF3 I notice that the game introduces input lag and just gets sloppy with both AA and AF. Fairly unacceptable in my opinion for a top tier game. Turn those off and it's smooth as butter. The AA is just bad imo compared to other games where it runs great, same with AF but not as bad as AA.

 

[subcutaneous]

I dunno if you ever noticed the article Tomshardware released all about microstuttering? http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/1xHD6870X2,0101-300543-0-2-3-1-png-.html

The article explains how two GPUs working together do essentially double the average frame rates. It also goes on to detail that this is accomplished by having extremely high FPS peaks, and extremely low FPS dips, constantly!

If you look at the graph below, it shows two cards working together on top, and one single card by itself on the bottom. As you can clearly see the minimum FPS of two cards together is very close the the constant FPS produced by just one card. In essence the game is CONSTANTLY zooming between the speed of one single card running the game, and two cards running at double speed.

Have you ever been in a car where someone hits the brakes, then the gas, and then the brakes? Yeah it's like that, fast then slow then fast then slow, over and over the entire time you play the game. You might get used to it if it was just on fast OR slow, but it is going to constantly swing between fast and slow, making it as noticeable as possible. This is referred to as micro-stuttering.

It's the dirty little secret of SLI/crossfire, that you're only going to see a marginal improvement in the best case scenario in game, and potentially a big drop in perceived quality due to this constant fast/slow cycle. In many games it almost seems like something is rhythmically lagging a bit every couple seconds, but nothing is and you will go crazy trying to smooth it out.

 

[Guest]

Exactly, I can elaborate on that as well.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516/8

Tech Report includes frame time in milliseconds for the 99%, which instead of just a fps chart, this really gives you an indication for how fast the game actually feels.

For SLI/Crossfire, fps charts aren't acurate for that exact reason. If a game is getting the high peaks at say 160fps and low peaks at 120fps constantly, the average will read 40fps, however the game will feel more like 120fps. You're losing a good number of fps off the already 70-80% scaling on a well scaling game.

Also, microstuttering may not feel as smooth as a single card.

 

[Guest]

Been there, done that also...
I will never SLI again, better to buy a better card upfront.
SLI and Crossfire = microstuttering, noise, crappy late drivers and huge power bill.

Can you elaborate on what you didn't like about it mostly? Was the microstuttering too noticeable and not as smooth as a single card? Did you experience any drastic or noticeable input lag with sli?