why cant sli/cf do uneven loads

S

strikeout

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 3, 2005
Messages
1,360
i really love having two monitors. I have a 37in westy and a 2007. I play mainly on my 2007 while i have secondary apps and tv on the westy. I really love my drag and drop windows and being able to maintain my communication aps like vent and messenger without alt tabing. I hate alt tabbing in the middle of a heated fight in a game.

my gripe is why cant sli/cf do uneven load balancing and dedicate needed power appropriately via drivers or manually configurated. My understanding is that SLI/CF share the load 50/50 to work on a single monitor to acheive better performance. Part of that design is why you arent able to do dual monitor with sli/cf corrrect? I would really love it if i could still have low resource apps on my secondary monitor and still have the bulk work on the game. Lets say i have two 88gtxs in sli for a total of 200% gpu power. Why cant they devote lets say 180% (more than enough even for most people) to the game on your primary monitor and have 20% devoted to your web browser/secondary apps. I think the most usefull would be for folks playing oblivion with an online walkthrough. But it would good for rts or rpg players who listen to itunes or winamp also.
 
They already have enough to fix with SLI as it is but yes that would be nice.

Side question, how do you use both screens without having to alt tab to use the application on the other screen? New to Dual moniters and been wondering hwo to do that but can't find anywhere :(
 
its application dependent unfortunately, bf2/2142 good to go. Im playing CoH right now and it sucks you must alt tab. Alt tabbing is not really a prob with dual monitors as i just need to see whats on my secondary screen. I hate alt tabbing on a single screen tho just to get a quick peek to see whos on xfire.
 
Technically, SLi/Crossfire can handle uneven loads. If one card is drawing half the pixels of the screen, often times the pixels it's drawing are more or less intensive than the pixels the other card is rendering. The performance of SLi/CF is not 100% efficient because of this and other minor restrictions.

I think the reason they don't want to implement what you want is because very few people do what you've attempted to do.

It may be possible run your second monitor exclusively with another PCI video card, but that's not really something I can guarantee will work in Windows.
 
it would be good if they actually did even loading, changing what percentage of the screen each card draws depending on whats going on.
 
phide said:
Technically, SLi/Crossfire can handle uneven loads. If one card is drawing half the pixels of the screen, often times the pixels it's drawing are more or less intensive than the pixels the other card is rendering. The performance of SLi/CF is not 100% efficient because of this and other minor restrictions.
Click to expand...
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njk2LDY=
[H]ard|OCP said:
In the second screenshot we have moved to looking at the ceiling in the same scene and you can see how the bar moved to find the best balance of load on both cards.
Click to expand...
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTEwMTE2NjQxOFVLcTZHRGVYNGNfNl83X2wuanBn
It may be possible run your second monitor exclusively with another PCI video card, but that's not really something I can guarantee will work in Windows.
Click to expand...
Yes it works, and this is actually how most people handle it. They usually recommend the PCI card be from the other manufacturer, to prevent the drivers from going haywire.
 
Of course, the load balancer is doing it's best to balance the intensiveness of the frame between both cards, but is not a perfect solution. The load balancing of SFR is not frame-accurate, and it's computations require some chewing time over a number of frames. My point was that SLi and CF are capable of operating in synchronization even if the load differs -- the performance scales down to the lowest denominator, reducing efficiency. With AFR, you're dumping load balancing altogether.
 
mavalpha said:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njk2LDY=

http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTEwMTE2NjQxOFVLcTZHRGVYNGNfNl83X2wuanBn

Yes it works, and this is actually how most people handle it. They usually recommend the PCI card be from the other manufacturer, to prevent the drivers from going haywire.
Click to expand...

the problem with a second video card acting alone and not in sli or cf is although it works, (thats how alot do triple monitors), the second card will be under utilized. Lets say getting 88gtx as your main card for games and you want the best performance for ur price range. So you go get a x19xt as the second independant card. The ATI card will be waisted as it cant help the 88 in games and will only do web browsing and stuff. They need to be synchronized if not true sli, maybe a main and assist cards that work on the same tasks at the same time, just in different proportions.
 
He'd only need a very simple PCI card with a good enough RAMDAC and enough VRAM to draw Explorer. The card only exists to draw whatever's on the second monitor, and it wouldn't be wasted.
 
true, if you wanted to go lowest common denominator as games + web. Now what if they have the money to go two high end cards, two big monitors and desires all eye candy. I think you dont necessarily need 2 full cards to achieve that but definately 1high end card + would do. hell maybe something like a 88gtx and 7 series card would be good to power a dell 30 on high.
 
never chat on your game box use another lowend box to chat email skype etc with a kvm.
popups are the devil
 
There are several games that support multiple monitors, though obviously not through SLI. Flight simulators are classic examples of this, although FPS has moved into the arena as well. If you want to run a video game across three screens, you NEED two high-end cards.

d50man:
Looks like that MSI is working out for you. :) Have you overclocked your e6300 on it yet?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top