Will Crossfire/SLI ever be good?

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Dpaw37

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If so, how soon? I understand the basic premise as to why it cannot currently be easily supported...but are we looking at years or decades still?


I also understand it can be a game by game basis. My question is focused on GPU companies making dual card configurations absolutely seamless.
 
Everyone talks bout dx12 being the best thing since sliced bread so maybe after dx12
 
DX12 apparantly has native support for mGPU's so hopefully it won't be long until the efficiencies get better!!
 
Ah yes... Forgot about dx12 and the supposed mentionings of dual gpu support
 
It's already "good", depending on the game. I'm not sure what would qualify as "good" in your mind though?
 
Rizen said:
It's already "good", depending on the game. I'm not sure what would qualify as "good" in your mind though?
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For me personally it would have to be 75%+ minimum on pretty much every game (instead of the current 50/60%).

Look forward to the day!! :cool:
 
[jF];1041695206 said:
For me personally it would have to be 75%+ minimum on pretty much every game (instead of the current 50/60%).

Look forward to the day!! :cool:
Click to expand...
On modern cards scaling is usually 70-90%. Not sure where you are getting 50% from.
 
Based on Mantle Games, Crossfire works Awesome with near 100% scaling so I'm looking forward to Vulkan & DX12.
 
I don't think we are ever going to see "seamless" CrossFire/SLI, at least not with the way that games are currently written. Mantle/DX12/Vulkan should allow very high performance multi-GPU setups and should hopefully move the work over to the game developers rather than requiring driver developers to work around game engine problems, but that just shifts the responsibility. You're still going to need programmers who can write the code to handle this, it still has to be written explicitly to the APIs as far as I know.

So is every game going to be seamless? No, but hopefully all the major game engines that developers use (Unity/UE/CryEngine/Frostbite) will have multi-GPU support under the new APIs.
 
Dpaw37 said:
If so, how soon? I understand the basic premise as to why it cannot currently be easily supported...but are we looking at years or decades still?


I also understand it can be a game by game basis. My question is focused on GPU companies making dual card configurations absolutely seamless.
Click to expand...

SLI is already great, with DX12 is will be exponentially greater awesomesauce.

Crossfire is not great as it has profile and driver issues
 
Ultranifty said:
SLI is already great, with DX12 is will be exponentially greater awesomesauce.

Crossfire is not great as it has profile and driver issues
Click to expand...

Your post history leads me to believe that you are very objective so I'll believe you.
 
I don't have experience with Crossfire but I feel SLI is "good" currently and has been for quite awhile.
 
Rizen said:
I don't think we are ever going to see "seamless" CrossFire/SLI, at least not with the way that games are currently written. Mantle/DX12/Vulkan should allow very high performance multi-GPU setups and should hopefully move the work over to the game developers rather than requiring driver developers to work around game engine problems, but that just shifts the responsibility. You're still going to need programmers who can write the code to handle this, it still has to be written explicitly to the APIs as far as I know.

So is every game going to be seamless? No, but hopefully all the major game engines that developers use (Unity/UE/CryEngine/Frostbite) will have multi-GPU support under the new APIs.
Click to expand...

Good response. Thanks. I suppose the waiting game begins considering how highly everyone is speaking of DX12/Vulkan
 
How is it not seamless? I couldn't tell if I had a single card or two in my system if I didn't know. And that's what seamless means.

All this FUD surrounding SLI/CF is really annoying me. I've been using SLI/Crossfire for years with great satisfaction.

When I got my first SLI setup I was fearful and had a lot of doubt because I read all the bs too, but there was absolutely no basis for any of it.
 
SLI usually works when it's needed; it's only stuff with low system requirements that doesn't have SLI support or the occasional AAA that is a poor port like Dead Rising 3 or Batman Arkham Knight.
 
I'm not sure what the issue is. SLI using two GTX680s has been nearly perfect for the last 3 years. Before that I ran 2x 4870x2 in Quad Crossfire which ran great also (including years afterward in my secondary rig), even with the extra potential issues created by 4 GPUs vs 2. There were only a very few games that didn't make full use of all 4 GPUs, and out of those, most still made use of at least 2.
 
Pretty broken. Every time a game didn't work in CrossfireX or SLi I wanted to rip the second card out of my PC and beat someone's ass with it. Maybe DX12 will help it as native support is supposedly baked into the OS. Lots of people say it works because it will work in the games that they are most interested in.

When AMD and Nvidia can get it to work in all titles I will declare it working properly. Games from a couple of years ago tend to suddenly lose their Crossfire / SLi profiles when newer drivers come out. This becomes an issue when you want to DSR / VSR those games to 4K and you purchased a second video card strictly for the purpose of doing this to older titles.

I tend to play a wide gamut of games instead of what comes out this month. So maybe my interpretation of "working as intended" is different from others.
 
DX12 doesn't natively support multi-GPU, it just allows it to be done without the high overhead and barriers that DX9-11 have.

Consider DX12 like a city permit to build a house. It simply allows you to build the house; the city isn't going to build it for you. That goes for all the hyped up features of DX12 like pooled memory and tiled resources.
 
Dpaw37 said:
If so, how soon? I understand the basic premise as to why it cannot currently be easily supported...but are we looking at years or decades still?


I also understand it can be a game by game basis. My question is focused on GPU companies making dual card configurations absolutely seamless.
Click to expand...

Both camps multi-card setups are great....its just getting those drivers out for the games.
 
In my experience SLI has worked well in games I needed it. My previous experience with crossfire was not as good.

I did buy a copy of Batman AK (a code off the FS thread, I didn't give them money directly) and will wait a few weeks for them to iron it out.

When I did mgpu again after a shitty Xfire experience I accepted it up front I may have to shut off SLI or avoid a game for a week or two. Ideally I wait a year but there are games here and there I can't resist (witcher 3 and battlefront in nov).

So now it's been a great exp with those cavets.

There have been some demos showing dx12 is much better at scaling and even using the igpu in combination with a dgpu. I have hopes but we'll have to see... I want octo-SLI pascal Titans :)
 
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