Wednesday, July 11th 2018

An Anthem for SLI: Bioware's New Universe in 60 FPS 4K Run on Two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti GPUs

Updated
Lo and Behold: SLI working properly. This was my first reaction whilst reading up on this potential news piece (which, somewhat breaking the fourth wall, actually did end up as one). My thought likely isn't alone; it's been a while since we heard of any relevant dual graphics card configuration and performance improvement now, as developers seem to be throwing dreams of any "Explicit Multi-GPU" tech out of the water. This slight deviation from the news story aside, though: Anthem needed two of the world's fastest GPUs running in tandem to deliver a 4K, 60 FPS experience.

Naturally, this doesn't mean that much by now: performance will improve, optimizations will happen - perhaps a watering of the graphics will happen (to be fair, we have seen that before, so the precedent is there). We know that. Still, it does speak volumes that that kind of graphics power was needed. Still, SLI'd GTX 1080Ti graphics cards for 4K and 60 FPS really isn't that extravagant: remember that the Cyberpunk 2077 demo from E3 ran at 1080p on a single such graphics card. Anthem used double the graphics power to push through a fourfold resolution increase - not too shabby. Anthem is just 7 months away (February 22nd) from release, though, while the bets are still off for Cyberpunk 2077. Still, both games look glorious, and Bioware's Anthem really does showcase the Frostbite engine as never seen before. Digital Foundry even seems to think that the showcased demo wasn't running with the full effects galore they observed on their playthroug at E3 - screen-space reflections were absent, for one. It seems the PC version of the game could look even better than what it does right now. Here's to that.

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