Help, 1080 ti SLI - low GPU usage, high cpu usage

A Loose Canon

Reputable
Mar 9, 2014
4
0
4,510
Hello, I am having issues with my new SLI setup. As the title says, I'm not getting the performance I expected from running these cards in SLI.

First of all, my specs:
ASUS Maximus VI HERO
i7 4770k on Hyper 212 EVO
16gb Corsair Dominator Platinum 1866
1080 ti F.E. x 2 both with evga hybrid kits installed
256GB Samsung 840 Pro (OS)
1TB Samsung 840 EVO (Games)
EVGA 1000w Gold Power Supply
ASUS PG278Q? (1440p 144Hz G-Sync)
Windows 10 Pro

My previous graphics cards were two 980 ti's, which are now in my secondary system that I have as a guest machine. With the exact same system, my 980 ti's were pushed all the way in SLI, at least in the games that support it properly. I have yet to play any of those games with the new pascal cards and get over 50-80% usage on each card, meanwhile cpu usage seems higher 80-99%. Performance seems slightly worse than when using only a single card, which btw runs at 99% usage in that scenario. I also tested each card independently, just to make sure I didn't have a dud or something.

I decided to go ahead and reformat and reinstall Windows, as I like to do every year or two anyway. So all hardware drivers are fresh and up to date.

Other things I have tried:


  • Playing around with a mild cpu OC of 4.2GHz
    Tried OC'ing the memory to 2166Mhz
    Also tried XMP
    Tried resetting UEFI to default settings
    Verified PCIe gen 3 was enabled in UEFI
    Verified no CPU cores are parked
    Raised the power limit on both GPU's to maximum in MSI afterburner, now limited by voltage only
    Disabling G-Sync completely (read there was issues with pascal SLI+G-Sync)


I know it's not the newest i7 CPU, but I didn't think it would have trouble driving these GPU's considering it did the job superbly for the 980ti's. I don't see anything in task manager that might be sucking up CPU resources, either.

Is there anything else I'm overlooking?

Thanks in advance.

 
Solution
Disable G-Sync in Nvidia control panel. I have the same issue with 1080ti sli and 5820k @4.5ghz. You will see a massive difference in fps with gsync off. Seems like G-Sync is broken with pascal cards ans SLi.
D

Deleted member 217926

Guest
An i7 is fine. An overclock would certainly help though.

http://www.babeltechreviews.com/gtx-1080-ti-sli-performance-25-games/2/

Multi GPU configurations are getting less and less support both from the graphics card makers ( no more than 2 cards supported now ) and the game developers.

http://www.babeltechreviews.com/gtx-1080-ti-sli-performance-25-games/3/

As you can see there performance actually decreased in some titles.

 

H3R0__

Prominent
Apr 18, 2017
1
0
520
Disable G-Sync in Nvidia control panel. I have the same issue with 1080ti sli and 5820k @4.5ghz. You will see a massive difference in fps with gsync off. Seems like G-Sync is broken with pascal cards ans SLi.
 
Solution