Good afternoon. So I was wondering why in the benchmarks it only shows 1 GPU when I have 2 980's in SLI mode? All other benchmarks and overclocking software shows both GPUs. Thanks
If you are running in DX12 mode, turn off (yes, off) SLI in the drivers, and enable MGPU in the game. If you're in DX11 then you'll likely need to wait for nVidia to make an SLI profile for the game.
Thanks for the quick reply. Unfort running on Win7 ATM on my desktop which means DX11. I'll have to see if/when Nvidia creates/releases a profile. Just odd that it doesn't show up in the benchmark.
Ashes does not support SLI. DX12 mGPU is supported.
Doesn't mGPU mean multiple GPUs? And isn't that the tech behind SLI?
DX11 = SLI
DX12 =mGPU
They use different underlying systems and are not the same thing.
Ok thanks for the info .....
DX12 antiquates SLI and Crossfire. These are both essentially legacy hardware workarounds originating from a fairly hair brained idea in the 90's(3dfx had a version of this the Voodoo series used that separated the work load by alternating scan lines) because the operating system side of things hasn't been able to handle multiple GPU's.
Crossfire and SLI both are very poor methods of working, in some ways they're actually worse than the original SLI 3dfx used, which was itself rife with problems before it self antiquated. To avoid artifact issues, they alternate frames between the cards, which adds significant delay as the frames sit in buffers waiting their turn while the other card spits one out. You can get a smoother visual experience with higher frame rates, yet see no benefit in the responsiveness of the system.
Attempts to use split frame rendering instead, which is the optimal method for performance, more along the lines of what 3dfx was doing back in the day, have gone rather poorly, with major tearing issues being a common result. With AFR, both cards have to load up all the assets, which means your dual GPU effectively has the same amount of memory as a single GPU would. In either case, the two cards aren't acting together, one is used as a slave device, receiving it's orders from the master card, and returning the finished product for a single output. It's as inefficient as it sounds, with the software communicating with one device, which then communicates wit the others.
DX12 makes it a direct line to each piece of hardware, bypassing a need for SLI or Crossfire by sending jobs to the specific cards, and making the more performance worthy methods of combining those assets more viable.
Supporting SLI and Crossfire is something you have to actively implement in software. They probably could do it without issues, but it would be a hassle for gains far inferior to what you'd see by upgrading to DX12 and getting that native support in combination with other efficiency gains.
While DX12 can facilitate SFR, at the moment Ashes is still effectively using an AFR system according to all the tech sites. That is why it is best if the two cards are very similar. Hopefully SFR comes to DX12 games at some point which in theory should allow game performance to improve even when the GPUs are very different in performance. Ashes is also not yet pooling the VRAM of the GPUs, something else that will be very cool when implemented, though I don't know if Ashes itself will ever do that.
SFR for Ashes would probably not have much of a benefit, aside from being able to pool VRAM. It's extremely important in shooters and other games where microseconds in added latency are the difference between life and death.
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