SLI with different cards

[Coler]

Have you tried Xtreme-G modded drivers ? For me it fixes Stuttering and FPS dips in SLI. Overall performance is also increased by 2-4 FPS, which is very small increase. Maybe it can fix your SLI performance issues.

Tried it! unfortunately not much changes. Thanks

 

[DonnerPartyOf1]

DSEFix no longer works for Apex either, they're doing a specific check for the vulnerable Virtualbox driver that's being exploited by the program.

There may be ways around it by interacting with kernel records but I'm still doing research and won't comment further yet.

EDIT: Good news! I didn't have to go mucking around in kernel memory too much because this guy did it for me. Using his solution I'm able to play Apex with SLI in my Q35 VM again, though I haven't tested this one for long-term stability yet. The dev claims to avoid all BSOD issues through his method and from reading the code it does seem to handle things a bit smarter than loading a 0-day vuln driver.

 

[Pretentious]

DSEFix no longer works for Apex either, they're doing a specific check for the vulnerable Virtualbox driver that's being exploited by the program.

There may be ways around it by interacting with kernel records but I'm still doing research and won't comment further yet.

EDIT: Good news! I didn't have to go mucking around in kernel memory too much because this guy did it for me. Using his solution I'm able to play Apex with SLI in my Q35 VM again, though I haven't tested this one for long-term stability yet. The dev claims to avoid all BSOD issues through his method and from reading the code it does seem to handle things a bit smarter than loading a 0-day vuln driver.

1) Nice find, EfiGuard looks fucking epic.
2) I got banned from Apex a few weeks ago for using a VM (I can confirm it was because of KVM since I wasn't using any unsigned drivers or doing any sort of funny business, KVM hidden state was on in order to avoid -43)
3) Just out of curiosity, how well does SLI work with Apex?

 

[Darekills4]

3) Just out of curiosity, how well does SLI work with Apex?

I am using two ZOTAC 1060s on Apex Legends and there's not much difference.
A single 1060 performs the same. (I tried with all settings maxed out except VSync on 1080p). 60 FPS all the time.
In fact, using 1060 SLI sometimes gives me weird flickering and shows shadows on a large portion of the map while in the dropship. But once you get closer to that area the issue is resolved. Doesn't really affect gameplay.

But I have to say the temperatures are much lower with two 1060s.
When I use a single 1060, it easily hits 70 to 73°C.
When using both cards, temperatures never go beyond 63°C.
This is with an ambient temperature of 35°C.

 

[DonnerPartyOf1]

1) Nice find, EfiGuard looks fucking epic.
2) I got banned from Apex a few weeks ago for using a VM (I can confirm it was because of KVM since I wasn't using any unsigned drivers or doing any sort of funny business, KVM hidden state was on in order to avoid -43)
3) Just out of curiosity, how well does SLI work with Apex?

I've put in about 80 hours on Apex in VM without issue. Sucks you got banned. I was banned day-1 in Destiny 2 for what I thought was the same reason but that account ended up unbanned months later so who knows.

SLI works great in Apex but Nvidia only distributes an SLI profile for RTX cards because of the game's temporal rendering techniques exceeding traditional SLI inter-card bandwidth. For GTX cards use SLI bits 0x080000F5 and Force AFR. Disable TAA (Use Reshade injected SMAA instead for AA without the blur). Disable Dynamic Spot Shadows. Turn Sun Shadow Coverage to Low. All 3 of these settings tank SLI performance but when I was running a single card I had them all disabled/low for higher framerate anyway. All other settings are preference but I keep ambient occlusion off and volumetric lighting disabled for visual clarity in-game.

I'm running 2x1080Ti @ 1440p144. One 1080Ti doesn't cut it at that resolution, there's too much geometry and wide open space in Apex. A single card dropped framerate around large towns to about 110-120. With two cards I never drop under 144 except in the plane seeing the entire map where I get about 135-140. There are some visual oddities where you can see texture LODs loading in your peripheral view, especially on drop, but once on the ground I don't notice it at all.

 

[Pretentious]

I am using two ZOTAC 1060s on Apex Legends and there's not much difference.
A single 1060 performs the same. (I tried with all settings maxed out except VSync on 1080p). 60 FPS all the time.
In fact, using 1060 SLI sometimes gives me weird flickering and shows shadows on a large portion of the map while in the dropship. But once you get closer to that area the issue is resolved. Doesn't really affect gameplay.

But I have to say the temperatures are much lower with two 1060s.
When I use a single 1060, it easily hits 70 to 73°C.
When using both cards, temperatures never go beyond 63°C.
This is with an ambient temperature of 35°C.

Thanks for the feedback. Temperature wise SLI sucks for me because there's barely any space between the slots, so the card on top suffocates and temps go as high as 86 with 1080 TI's.

I've put in about 80 hours on Apex in VM without issue. Sucks you got banned. I was banned day-1 in Destiny 2 for what I thought was the same reason but that account ended up unbanned months later so who knows.

SLI works great in Apex but Nvidia only distributes an SLI profile for RTX cards because of the game's temporal rendering techniques exceeding traditional SLI inter-card bandwidth. For GTX cards use SLI bits 0x080000F5 and Force AFR. Disable TAA (Use Reshade injected SMAA instead for AA without the blur). Disable Dynamic Spot Shadows. Turn Sun Shadow Coverage to Low. All 3 of these settings tank SLI performance but when I was running a single card I had them all disabled/low for higher framerate anyway. All other settings are preference but I keep ambient occlusion off and volumetric lighting disabled for visual clarity in-game.

I'm running 2x1080Ti @ 1440p144. One 1080Ti doesn't cut it at that resolution, there's too much geometry and wide open space in Apex. A single card dropped framerate around large towns to about 110-120. With two cards I never drop under 144 except in the plane seeing the entire map where I get about 135-140. There are some visual oddities where you can see texture LODs loading in your peripheral view, especially on drop, but once on the ground I don't notice it at all.

Yeah it happens. I was banned before season 1 came out (I appealed but they refused to unban me) so I wouldn't be surprised if you suffer the same faith during the next ban wave. I am currently stuck trying to get a PCI-e USB 3.1 card to work with IOMMU/DMAR but once I'm done with that I will either work on trivial stuff like renaming virt-io drivers or possibly work on some VM detection evasion tailored to EasyAnti-cheat (who knows, maybe all they do is a couple MSR's and call it a day).

I play at 4k 60fps, With a single 1080TI I was getting around 55-60fps with a couple of settings deactivated and everything else on max but I do suffer significant micro stutter during heavy fighting scenes (pretty sure I'm bottlenecked by the xeon 2680 v2, fortnite was a similar story). Another issue with playing with VM's is high DPC but I managed to work around that by compiling the latest QEMU with a couple of tweaks.

 

[Coler]

These anticheats are just a pain in the a*s...

 

[DonnerPartyOf1]

Thanks for the feedback. Temperature wise SLI sucks for me because there's barely any space between the slots, so the card on top suffocates and temps go as high as 86 with 1080 TI's.



Yeah it happens. I was banned before season 1 came out (I appealed but they refused to unban me) so I wouldn't be surprised if you suffer the same faith during the next ban wave. I am currently stuck trying to get a PCI-e USB 3.1 card to work with IOMMU/DMAR but once I'm done with that I will either work on trivial stuff like renaming virt-io drivers or possibly work on some VM detection evasion tailored to EasyAnti-cheat (who knows, maybe all they do is a couple MSR's and call it a day).

I play at 4k 60fps, With a single 1080TI I was getting around 55-60fps with a couple of settings deactivated and everything else on max but I do suffer significant micro stutter during heavy fighting scenes (pretty sure I'm bottlenecked by the xeon 2680 v2, fortnite was a similar story). Another issue with playing with VM's is high DPC but I managed to work around that by compiling the latest QEMU with a couple of tweaks.

Good luck with the PCI-e card. I've read it's basically a cointoss with those on whether or not it will actually support hot reset. Luckily for me I have no use for high speed connectivity in the VM outside of my internal drives and network, so I just picked up a USB 3.0 uPD720201 which works out of box.

Battle Royale games and microstutter, name a more iconic duo. I'm also quite sure your bottleneck is the 2680, Ivy Bridge is getting long in the tooth. Spectre/Meltdown mitigations hurt you badly if you haven't disabled them. An upgrade to Haswell-E (or equivalent gen server component) or newer would solve much of your stutter issue with the introduction of vAPIC support on top of the increased computational throughput. I'm fortunate enough to have a 7920X and I never have any stutter issues or high DPC after proper tuning. I might actually put that to the test and try out Serious Sam 3 VR using the VR SLI mode and see if I can perceive stutter.

 

[tbone3366]

@P!nkpanther
i cant figure out how to get it to work
driver 417.35
windows 10 64 Home
EVGA SC 760
MSI 770

im lost and dont know what to do, all of the links lead me to nowhere and this is a solid month of attempts that have been failed, can you list all the steps and what i need to look for in the hex editor if thats needed, my board supports sli 8th Gen board, thank you for your time

 

[Darekills4]

Thanks for the feedback. Temperature wise SLI sucks for me because there's barely any space between the slots, so the card on top suffocates and temps go as high as 86 with 1080 TI's.

That's hot.
My cards would suffer the same fate, and my top card does actually run two or three degrees higher.
Luckily, my side fan is located exactly where it would blow air right in between the tiny space of the two cards.

Remove the side fan and I am easily above 80°C.

 

[tbone3366]

So i got 388.71 to work and get to sli tab for my 760 and 770 but when i enable SLI it crashes the driver, what could i do because when i manually select the two cards to test they work individually but i want the sli performance as i dont have the ability to upgrade rn, i dont want to upgrade yet, i want to wait for RTX cards to be sub 500 for a 2070 or even 1080TI.

 

[P!nkpanther]

All that DifferentSLIauto does is basically unlock the SLI button for you.
Whatever happens after you enable SLI, is at the mercy of the driver itself.
In some cases everything runs fine, in others the whole thing crashes.
Unfortunately there's nothing you can do.
But I don't think you miss out on much, since the the best performance you could hypothetically get is twice that of the slower card.
In your case that would have been ~40% better than your faster card in theory, but in practice only like ~20%.

 

[tbone3366]

@P!nkpanther thank you for the reply, if i come up with a fix for this ill post it here, do you think adding the sli bridge could prevent crashing, im gonna go buy one its only 16$ where im at, if it was the same as mobo hacking it would be easy, i do NON K overclocking bios mods

 

[P!nkpanther]

...do you think adding the sli bridge could prevent crashing

Chances are slim.
The only cases where I know of crashes after enabling SLI, were because of non-matching cards.
Just a missing bridge usually keeps SLI still functional, albeit with much higher load on the PCIe bus.

 

[tbone3366]

ill try out the sli and and post back, im gonna go hex diving and find id managers, links, sli info, bus info, gonna run both 16 slots at 8x and equal frequency, basically everything, i have 2 weeks of vacation coming up and ill use that to do this, i got the 760 to work with a 730, but i need to try the 770 again, im gonna try VT-x being on.

 

[topmysteries5]

New nvidia 425.31 driver is released, which Includes support for DirectX Raytracing (DXR) on GTX 1060 and above.

So i got 388.71 to work and get to sli tab for my 760 and 770 but when i enable SLI it crashes the driver, what could i do because when i manually select the two cards to test they work individually but i want the sli performance as i dont have the ability to upgrade rn, i dont want to upgrade yet, i want to wait for RTX cards to be sub 500 for a 2070 or even 1080TI.

I have tried GTX 780 + 770 SLI in past, it doesnt work. Only black screen after enabling SLI, even after using SLI connectors.
Same happens with GTX 1070 + 1080, 1050ti+ 1080 too.

 

[tbone3366]

@topmysteries5
The farthest I could get was enabling SLI but when loading into any opengl or DX program crashes driver but windows is fine, there's something to it and I will find it last night I got that far

 

[Pretentious]

New nvidia 425.31 driver is released, which Includes support for DirectX Raytracing (DXR) on GTX 1060 and above.



I have tried GTX 780 + 770 SLI in past, it doesnt work. Only black screen after enabling SLI, even after using SLI connectors.
Same happens with GTX 1070 + 1080, 1050ti+ 1080 too.

Lets trace some rays:

425.31
=====================
00000000002C32A5: 84 C7
00000000002C32A6: C0 43
00000000002C32A7: 75 24
00000000002C32A8: 05 00
00000000002C32A9: 0F 00
00000000002C32AA: BA 00
00000000002C32AB: 6B 00

 

[q5sys]

Not worth it, because the max. theoretical framerate is twice that of the slower card. And in reality it's even lower than that.

Even without the problem with the bridge, it would not be possible due to the different GPU architecture of 1xxx and 2xxx

My question which I have not found the answer to anywhere else while searching is; could this patching technique be used to enable SLI/NVLink between two RTX 2070 or two RTX 2060 cards. Lets assume this the best possible arrangement where the two cards being used are the exact same model from the exact same vendor with the exact same specs.

 

[tbone3366]

Would it hurt to create a restore point like I and try different sli

 

[P!nkpanther]

My question which I have not found the answer to anywhere else while searching is; could this patching technique be used to enable SLI/NVLink between two RTX 2070 or two RTX 2060 cards. Lets assume this the best possible arrangement where the two cards being used are the exact same model from the exact same vendor with the exact same specs.

Yes, but don't bet any money on getting it to work in all hardware configurations.

Would it hurt to create a restore point like I and try different sli

 

[tbone3366]

I created A System Restore, when I installed different SLI auto have to reboot, sometimes I'd crash, well I got it good to a point where you can enable with a 760 and 770, but when launching apps driver crashes so I'd load the restore point safemode and tweak the nvddm driver thingy

 

[Darekills4]

Lets trace some rays:

425.31
=====================
00000000002C32A5: 84 C7
00000000002C32A6: C0 43
00000000002C32A7: 75 24
00000000002C32A8: 05 00
00000000002C32A9: 0F 00
00000000002C32AA: BA 00
00000000002C32AB: 6B 00

Well, I decided to give it a shot on Battlefield V, it seems the performance improvement with one card on DirectX 12 is much better than two cards on DirectX 11.
One card on DX12 (without ray tracing) gave me a solid 60 FPS, a few bumps here and there that got me to 50, but never below 50.

Two cards on DX11 (without ray tracing as DX11 doesn't support it) gave me about 50 FPS with drops to 40 FPS all the time when entering fight areas.

DX12 with any levels of ray tracing gave me about 30 FPS. I tried all levels of ray tracing except low.

But using two cards does keep the temperature a bit lower.

All settings were kept on Ultra, 1080p while making these tests.

My config:
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 (rev. 1.1)
AMD FX-8350
16GB RAM
2 x Zotac 1060 6GB AMP! Edition
1080p display

 

[bossvanvan01]

I get Zotac Rtx amp 2080 change Zotac Gtx 1080ti amp extreme from Repair SVOA. RTX 2080Ti can differentsliauto RTX 2080? (2080Ti x 2080) or sell 2080 up 2080Ti ? but Nvlink or Sli can't open Ray Dlss ? If can't open Ray Dlss useless. Or some game?

 

[Darekills4]

I get Zotac Rtx amp 2080 change Zotac Gtx 1080ti amp extreme from Repair SVOA. RTX 2080Ti can differentsliauto RTX 2080? (2080Ti x 2080) or sell 2080 up 2080Ti ? but Nvlink or Sli can't open Ray Dlss ? If can't open Ray Dlss useless. Or some game?

There is no telling if one 2080 Ti and one 2080 will work with DifferentSLIAuto. You will have to try for yourself. DifferentSLIAuto works best with two of the same cards.

Whether DLSS will work with two cards or not is entirely up to the game. I tried Battlefield 5 which can be SLIed with DirectX 11 and not with DirectX 12 and DLSS works only with Direct 12 and not with DirectX 11, so I was unable to check SLIed DLSS in case of Battlefield 5.
Some games might support DLSS on DirectX 11, others may not. And it seems not a lot of developers are implementing multi GPU DirectX 12 support either.

I found this video of DLSS on DirectX 11 with NVLink, so it's entirely up to the developers