- Joined
- Feb 8, 2012
- Messages
- 3,013 (0.68/day)
- Location
- Zagreb, Croatia
System Name | Windows 10 64-bit Core i7 6700 |
---|---|
Processor | Intel Core i7 6700 |
Motherboard | Asus Z170M-PLUS |
Cooling | Corsair AIO |
Memory | 2 x 8 GB Kingston DDR4 2666 |
Video Card(s) | Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB |
Storage | Western Digital Caviar Blue 1 TB, Seagate Baracuda 1 TB |
Display(s) | Dell P2414H |
Case | Corsair Carbide Air 540 |
Audio Device(s) | Realtek HD Audio |
Power Supply | Corsair TX v2 650W |
Mouse | Steelseries Sensei |
Keyboard | CM Storm Quickfire Pro, Cherry MX Reds |
Software | MS Windows 10 Pro 64-bit |
If you understand what the graphs show(an increase in frame-to-frame render latency), that should be enough, really. Visually it amounts to a momentary pause.
When you add a second card, because this doubles that delay, the pause is even longer, and becomes even more noticeable, to the point that singlecard performance is perceptibly smoother, even though the framerate is significantly lower.
AMD has said, that with DX10 and DX11, this is due to memory management. With DX9, performance is adequate enough that it can be dealt with easily, as far as I can tell, but I'm not expert with that sort of stuff at all.
So, imagine playing at 60+FPS, and it's nice and smooth. FPS drops below 60 with some action, and it becomes less smooth. Staying above 60 FPS will keep that smoothness. Adding a second card, and increasing performance above 60 FPS should keep the same smoothness, right?
Unfortunately, what happens is that those stutters from going to less than 60 FPS overall still apply, but PER CARD, so that now to maintain a smooth experience, you need 120 FPS, negating the usefulness of the second card. Add in that the added driver overhead from managing both cards, and overall you end up with a worse experience than with one card.
Thanks for the clarification Dave.
Looking at these graphs, what surprised me is that FRAPS actually makes SLI look worse than it is (frame time fluctuation wise) and CrossFire looks better than it is.
Also it looks like there is some smoothing going on with SLI when looking at hardware capture graphs. If it's all due to memory management, no wonder Kepler team was so proud about it.
I agree there is no drama (except in the thread title :shadedshu what was I thinking?) people know what are the tradeoffs with multi gpu setups.
With AMD not producing any new GPUs this year, I would be surprised if they didn't improve the drivers significantly during that time. It should all be fixed soon, provided they didn't fire their driver team.