SLI/Crossfire - is it worth it for BlackShark?

[Celo63]

Does BlackShark currently take advantage of SLI/Crossfire and if not, will it be supported in future versions of the sim engine? I have seen a few posts about SLI/Crossfire but none seem to answer the question 100% for sure.

 

Anyone from the ED team care to comment on current and future SLI/Crossfire implementation in the sim engine? Please?

 

I'm saving to buy a new PC before christmas (hopefully) and will probably go the SLI route with a pair of GTX 275 cards. With an i7-920 clocked to 4 GHz, they should make a good system for me to run most things at full tilt and it works out cheaper than buying a single GTX 295. Yet when you look at Tom's Hardware "Sum of FPS Benchmarks Totals" a pair of 275's beats a single 295. Looking good so far.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-2009-high-quality/Sum-of-FPS-Benchmarks-Totals,1469.html

 

A single GTX 275 is a bit down the list however so I'd be a bit bummed out if BlackShark only use one card and I couldn't drive a TripleHead2Go with decent frame rates. Dilemma.

 

Advice, suggestions or accounts of experiences with similar systems would be appreciated.

 

Cheers.

[Cezar11]

I just added another ati 4850 and enabled xfire... I was able to crank up the detail to the max and my fps is now smooth as glasss... no stuttering at all..

 

I would recommend it...

[Celo63]

Max detail, smooth as glass... sounds good to me :thumbup:

 

Decision made. Thanks Cezar.

[AussieFX]

I certainly wouldn't be buying a GTX275 with the new ATI cards due anyday. That would be a very poor choice. The new 5870 is rumoured to be faster than a GTX295 and has support for 6 monitors at some ridiculous resolutions.

I would hold off for a week and make your mind up when the cards are actually released.

[CyBerkut]

Yes, holding off for a little while, if you can stand it, will probably be worthwhile. The initial ATI 58xx series card(s) that are reportedly due out later this month will initially only be the version(s) that support 3 displays. The 6 display version(s) will probably be out by Christmas.

 

Hell, even the 3 display version should let you do Camera + Shkval + Abris without being in windowed mode, in Win Vista or 7. In light of my own long-term grandiose plans, I'm looking at holding off for the 6 display version (or if nVidia releases something comparable / competitive...).

[Congo_Toey]

I am using 2 HD4870x2's in quad crossfirex and it seems that dcs blackshark only uses one of the gpu's. Does anyone know if thissims supports crossfirex, I am using catalyst 9.9 drivers, windows 7 64bit.

[sweinhart3]

I dont think that DCS graphically challenges the higher performance GPUs. I am running a Nvidia GTX 285. I tried rebuilding my system to incorporate 2 of those cards in SLI and I got an additional 1fps out of it. Hardly worth the $1000 I had to spend to get a new motherboard, power supply, and video card. I tried several system settings and I couldnt get any better so I returned all that garbage. DCS is very much CPU bound so 1 good video card will do you just fine.

[Congo_Toey]

Actually I have 5xGPU's (1GTX 275 for PhysX and two HD4870x2 in Quad Crossfire) and 4x24" monitors, plus a TrackIR 5 amd a Triplehead2Go. With this setup I am trying to get a fully immersive and realistic graphical surround experience.

 

I have tried many confugrations, having 4 views (centre, left, right and bottom), or having one view on the Triplehead and one on the the bottom monitor. The main issue is that when using more than one view getting the views to line up properly is nearly impossible and also using the Triplehead2go makes it all very distorted because the native resolution of the monitors is different than the options available using the TH2G due to the restrictions of using a dual link DVI cable. Even so having the TH2G connected into my Quad crossfire setup and the other montior on my GTX 275, had not any benifit at all because all the TH2G data and the graphics that was being displayed was all being processed on on GPU on the ATI cards and then the display information was being sent out to each display connection.

 

So now I have removed the TH2G and connected one monitor to one graphics card connection having one large view (5760x2160), this gives me the best looking graphics accross all four monitors, it all lines up perfectly and by changing the view angle to 200 and then zooming out to the max zoomed out, it really loks like you are sat in the cockpit. But as the monitors need to be configured in windows7 as one main monitor and the others are extended from it, the GPU of the graphics card connected to the main monitor, the 0,0 point for the rendering, is the one that is used for rendering al the data. It turns out that my single GTX 275 GPU overclocked (14 fps average) renders better than the single HD 4870 GPU overclocked(7 fps avergae).

 

It is not like I have a slow CPU either, because I have an i7 975 overclocked to 4.3 GHz on water, running on a EVGA Classified motherboard, the CPU load is about 40 -50% at max. I have 6Gigs of DDR3 memory running 1800 MHz, so dont think that is an issue either.

 

I do know that DSC must be rendering the data that is outside of my montiors view as well, as the resolution I am using actually should span over 6 monitors.

 

So I cant help but wonder how great it would be, if I could make use of the other 4 GPU's to render the data as well. What a great experience that would be.

[CyBerkut]

Congo Toey, it sounds like you might be a prime candidate for a Lucid Hydra, if it works as claimed. Unfortunately the first one coming out is socket 1156 based. MSI is about to come out with a MoBo that has it:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1093/1/

 

http://www.slashgear.com/lucid-hydra-200-powers-msi-big-bang-mainboard-2357770/

 

http://www.dvhardware.net/article38046.html

 

Hopefully, if Hydra works, we'll see socket 1366 based MoBos before too long.

[AussieFX]

Actually I would have thought Eyefinity might have been better for him. Ditch that expensive matrox triplehead.

 

Anyway back onto the topic, when I had crossfired 4870's I used to disable one card, I never really checked framerates because it was smooth enough but I occasionally suffered some corruption with it enabled.

Either way if it does help it doesn't help much and certainly isn't worth going and paying hundreds of dollars for.

 

I would like to see ED pay some attention in this area though. Maybe with the new engine?

[Congo_Toey]

Well I do more than just run the DCS sim with this setup, you can checkout my website http://www.congo-toey.com/my-rig/ and see that I am seriously into overclocking and benchmarking as well other sorts of FPS games. This rig works very well for the other sorts of things I do.

 

I am new to flight sims, but this is for sure a fantastic intro to the sim work, and I am lovong every minute of it, my flying is getting much better and I can even kill things now as well. Landings are still a bit bumpy but getting better all the time. I really think there should be some sort of sim flight school where you cna learn the basics.

 

I just think it is a shame that I can not use the processing power that I have, but I will likely upgrade to having multiple ATI eyefinity cards within a few months and then change to 6 monitors on the display port technology.

 

The lucid hydra sounds interesting, as at the moment to get the Physx of nVidia working with my ATI cards I have to use old nVidia drivers as they stopped letting us do it with newer cards. Although I only really use it for benchmarking.

 

I think that DCS blackshark is an amazing piece of engineering and well done to all the people who managed to simulate this helicopter and all the supporting parts of the simulator so well, but could you imagine how good the scenary could be that you are flying in, if the rendering engine could support multi gpu's, as one does so well with what is there already.

[CyBerkut]

Eyefinity holds a lot of promise, depending on how future GPU card offerings are implemented. The subject has been covered pretty well in other threads.

 

One of the interesting things about the Lucid Hydra for the Crossfire / SLI users is that it would make better use of all the available GPUs when multiple monitors are being driven.

[sweinhart3]

I could be wrong but from the various posts Ive read, increasing the graphics to a point that would tax modern video cards is not on ED's primary agenda. Even with the graphics enhancements they plan to put in (supposedly with the A-10 module) it still wont likely put a burden on the graphics card. I run a gtx 280 and so far only new fps titles and perhaps FSX can slow it down when you have high density graphics. If ED isnt going in that direction then they are better off multi-threading the sim. A quad core that is well threaded can get about 2.5 times the performance of single core.

[Congo_Toey]

Hi Sweinhart3, yeah I agree totally with you that the SIM should be able to be run on a level that is not really designed to try and tax the latest graphics cards, making it available to as many people as possible.

 

However I also think that by supporting a multi GPU with extra graphics memory that can be then used as well, the SIM can be more scalable to high resolution systems like my own, where I am running a 5760 x 2160 resolution, over four monitors, and maybe six monitors soon. This enables a virtual surround cockpit where you are surrounded by the graphics.

 

I believe that the SIM already supports Multi CPU with the latest patches, I have not really seen any improvement in performance though.

[sweinhart3]

Hi Sweinhart3, yeah I agree totally with you that the SIM should be able to be run on a level that is not really designed to try and tax the latest graphics cards, making it available to as many people as possible.

 

However I also think that by supporting a multi GPU with extra graphics memory that can be then used as well, the SIM can be more scalable to high resolution systems like my own, where I am running a 5760 x 2160 resolution, over four monitors, and maybe six monitors soon. This enables a virtual surround cockpit where you are surrounded by the graphics.

 

I believe that the SIM already supports Multi CPU with the latest patches, I have not really seen any improvement in performance though.

 

Thats because it doesnt really support Multi CPU aka multithreading. The SIM simply changed the default CPU affinity setting to not be forced to run on a single core. It just helps Windows manage the background tasks better without affecting framerate.

[Outlaw24]

So are there any ideas as to whether or not DSC will add support for SLI? Will the move to 64 bit include SLI also?