Sli

[shovenose]

I have an AMD FX-8350 CPU with an ASRock motherboard. Will this support SLI?

[mariushm]

Re: Sli

Depends on motherboard and the chipset and/or other chips are used (Lucid etc)

[shovenose]

Re: Sli

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157280
this is my motherboard. thanks

[mariushm]

Re: Sli

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970%20Extreme3/

No mention of SLI, so i'm leaning towards a NO.

However, theoretically the 990fx chipset supports SLI , and the 970 chipset (the one you have) in theory supports sli

970 Extreme 4 supports SLI and it's same chipset so it should work, but who knows.. maybe it's restricted through bios? Anyway, one card would run at x4 so maybe that's why it isn't advertised, maybe it won't work.

[shovenose]

Re: Sli

That sucks. Would I be better off with two AMD Radeon cards in CrossFire then? My only concern is that I think GTA IV is better on nVidia.

[mariushm]

Re: Sli

GTA4 is choking on CPU, not video card.
It's poorly optimized in that regard, even with eight cores if you have a good video card it's still cpu limited.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,2699-11.html

[Pentium4]

Re: Sli

No that board doesn't support SLI What video card do you have?

[shovenose]

Re: Sli

My CPU is never over 25% when playing the game.
Right now my primary cards is a GTX 550 Ti and then I've got one half of a GTX 295 dedicated to PhysX.
And I don't overclock.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Sli

its cause of the placing of the slots mainly. One guy said he got SLI working, others say it dosen't have it (of course, I'm not sure they tried). You would have to SLI or CF it with a 16x and 4x combo, not the best of ideas

[Mad_Professor]

Re: Sli

I'll be honest, I've had SLI. If you already have an old card and want to keep using it, sli or crossfire is good for that, otherwise take the money you would have spent on the two cards and buy a more powerful one.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Sli

yeah some games don't like SLI

but if you have an old Nvidia video card with dedicated phsx, just put it in and use it as a physx card

WHY can't nvidia make a cheap, 1x physx card?

oh yeah, cause then people can pair it with a competitors card and not have to buy a full Nvidia card. I see what you did there

[cheapie]

Re: Sli

*sigh*

WHY can't developers just use OpenCL or something? It would make life easier for all of us.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Sli

CL won't accelerate hardware graphics computing, its only for general computing. CPU's are powerful enough now a days for games we really don't need it. And running CL and 3d rendering on the same gpu?--if possible, sounds like a very very very bad idea

[mariushm]

Re: Sli

Physx is technically obsolete by now. Havok and other systems already do what Phsyx does and better.

Remember, Ageia Physx was a weak arm processor with some instructions optimized for physics, nothing special. nVidia just bought the company and converted the software to run with shaders on the video card. If physix can work on 40-60$ cards, you can imagine how much processing power it needs these days... very little.

If it wasn't for patents and nvidia not licensing the tech to other companies, it would run just fine in hardware on AMD or Intel cards.

They even have to make the software physx work slower than normal by not enabling cpu optimizations, they're doing it on purpose to slow down other cards when enabling phsyx (remember batman games getting locked at low framerates with software physx enabled)

Here's a very good article about physx in software : http://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/

quoting just a small part of the very good article:

PhysX is certainly not using x87 because of the advantages of extended precision. The original PPU hardware only had 32-bit single precision floating point, not even 64-bit double precision, let alone the extended 80-bit precision of x87. In fact, PhysX probably only uses single precision on the GPU, since it is accelerated on the G80, which has no double precision. The evidence all suggests that PhysX only needs single precision.

PhysX is certainly not using x87 because it contains legacy x87 code. Nvidia has the source code for PhysX and can recompile at will.

PhysX is certainly not using x87 because of a legacy installed base of older CPUs. Any gaming system purchased since 2005 will have SSE2 support, and the PPU was not released till 2006. Ageia was bought by Nvidia in 2008, and almost every CPU sold since then (except for some odd embedded ones) has SSE2 support. PhysX is not targeting any of the embedded x86 market either; it’s designed for games.

The truth is that there is no technical reason for PhysX to be using x87 code. PhysX uses x87 because Ageia and now Nvidia want it that way. Nvidia already has PhysX running on consoles using the AltiVec extensions for PPC, which are very similar to SSE. It would probably take about a day or two to get PhysX to emit modern packed SSE2 code, and several weeks for compatibility testing. In fact for backwards compatibility, PhysX could select at install time whether to use an SSE2 version or an x87 version – just in case the elusive gamer with a Pentium Overdrive decides to try it.

But both Ageia and Nvidia use PhysX to highlight the advantages of their hardware over the CPU for physics calculations. In Nvidia’s case, they are also using PhysX to differentiate with AMD’s GPUs. The sole purpose of PhysX is a competitive differentiator to make Nvidia’s hardware look good and sell more GPUs.

OpenCL and Cuda use some of the same processing units games do, shader and vertex modules, only in some cases they configure the modules to work a bit differently (better floating point precision for example which makes calculations more accurate, but it's pointless for graphic stuff in games, so the framerate would be lower in games if the modules were used that way in games)

Technically, games could use a part of the video card as a video card and a part as cuda/opencl but the current games don't have much to do that would require opencl/cuda ... Civilization 5 for example uses OpenCL or Cuda (or both) to render the terrain and do some texture processing if I remember correctly, but that's mostly doing level loading.