Installation was a breeze. Just plugged it in, plugged in the NVLINK adaptor (that green thing in the photo above) and then after booting I checked the enable SLI option in the NVIDIA menu. Tested with 3dmark, got over 16.000 which landed me in the top 15 there, LOL. Which makes one think, my system isn’t optimized at all, so not a lot of people are running setups like this. And I found out quite soon why …
Negative scaling is really a pain in the a$$. Video players like simple VR player don’t run as smooth, I had to turn down super sampling quite a bit to get to the 120 hz frame rate as I always enjoyed with just 1 video card. Also in some games I noticed lower performance. So I thought, ok in those cases I’ll just disable SLI. However it’s not really just a matter of disabling SLI in the NVIDIA menu, even with that option disabled I still get that effect. Maybe I just need to disable the whole card in the hardware manager?
Anyway, in known VR SLI supported games like Serious Sam there’s indeed a quite noticeable performance boost. Scenes with a lot of enemies that used to stutter with 1 card, now run smoothly. But as everybody knows that list is quite small.
For now, I think I’ll keep the SLI setup for maybe a few months, play the serious Sam series, Raw data and games like that and then will probably sell the card again.
By the way, I have it all running on a (edited) 850w power supply, I thought that I might run into problems but it seems to work fine, even under heavy load.
Would you please try NMS for me? I have a second 2080ti in my Simrig but rarely using it because of enjoying NMS too much lately .
BTW, i bought a Index and enjoying it a lot! I think the FOV of the Index heavily depends on the IPD. The higher the IPD, the greater the experienced FOV. So i am on the happy side to have an almost 70isch IPD. I feel the FOV is at least comparable with the small Pimax FOV setting but honestly i did not bother to compare SBS with my 8K.
I am just very happy to enjoy NMS that way. After the latest updates it runs with all ingame settings at Ultra with SteamSS around 150% at 144Hz buttersmooth. Yes, the Projection kicks in a lot - especially while on planets - but that does not bother me at all.
I actually just realized it’s 850W and not 750W, lol, that’s probably why it’s stable. It’s a Corsair MX.
Yeah it’s not good for its life indeed, but hopefully 850W will last long enough. I’m guestimating that the max power it pulls is about 730W, but will measure that later. If it indeed maxes out at that level, it will probably be fine.
Well that was probably when I destroyed my Reverb within 1 day because I tried to move the panels apart for bigger IPD, LOL.
I bought this SLI setup primarily for Serious Sam, my favourite game that I play at the moment and it works quite well with that, I haven’t measured but I think I’m getting about 50-60% more performance, so who knows that might even beat next years 3080TI. Will probably sell the card when I’m done with the Serious Sam series. Some people buy haptic suits that only work with a handful of games, others whole flight simulator cockpits for 1-2 sims. Things can get a bit out of hand when it’s about one’s hobby
Glad to hear you’re enjoying the Index so much! Yeah for me it’s really a game changer, I’ve never enjoyed VR so much as with the index. Problem now though is that it’s getting way too addictive, lol.
I haven’t bought NMS, so can’t run the test for you. But if it had VR SLI support, I think we would have known. Most likely it doesn’t support it.
@SweViver: is there a way that pimax e.g. in piTool can use the two cards before the games to get some boost?
It’s a shame that so little of the nifty features of our cards are actually used.
Running SLI is not about being economic- it’s Enthusiasm and that being the reason most of us are here (who needs 4k, 5k, 8k,… ;-), besides us ) ! Otherwise we would all still be on the GameBoy Green Screen …
Edit: I belive that “Strange Brigade” was also one of the view games that used what the cards can do - has good performance - but sadly no VR (and is not quite my game).
Nope. Just increase your ipd on your Vive/pro/Index and you see the lenses coming more apart - more of your FOV is filled. Or try the other way round and set the hmd ipd to min value. You see your FOV shrinking
Edit: your assumption is true with fixed hardware ipd hmds like Rift-s/reverb
Even without SLI, I’ve been thinking it would be nice if one could farm out procgen and physics to a second card, which I figure shouldn’t need to be matched – would give a second life to my old 980Ti. :7
Well, kind of… If you set your lens spacing higher or lower than your actual FOV, the occlusion relationship will change, but then you are both moving out of the sweet spot, and were very likely too far from the lenses to begin with, so that you were not getting the full view… and may probably also have had to offset, in software, the game camera spacing, from the physical lens spacing, that is checked by potentiometer and reported to the VR runtime by the headset – normally the camera frustums are not skewed for anything of the like.
Yeah it’s a chicken-egg problem. Developers won’t think it’s a good investment because there are almost no games running SLI. And gamers of course won’t buy SLI because there are almost no supported games. Too bad, cause we need more GPU power
Well we should honor those who try SLI/CrossFire - I always wanted one but never managed to jump into it.
There should be a petition, maybe some companies would jump the train if they smell the money (mostly Prestige I guess, don’t think the numbers would be to great.)
Maybe some companies like pimax and NVIDIA/ATI could team up and give prices to the first 3 VR Games going SLI and VR API. For some Indi Studios that could be tempting- especially if NVIDIA/ATI could give them some support…
Ooo-kay… Did you write that expecting readers to get hung up on the image of Neo and Trinity becoming surrounded by endless ranks of shelves full of graphics cards, that come rushing out of the white void of their construct environment, after declaring that they need GPUs - lots of GPUs?
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