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Video Issues...

W

Wonko the Sane

First Post
I recently built what I thought would be a cutting-edge gaming rig (EVGA 680i LT w/SLI, Core2 Duo E6850, 4 GB RAM, 2 x EVGA 8800 GTX 768 MB, 500 GB HD, Vista Home Premium), but I've been having troubles getting any newer game such as Crysis or UT3 to run smoothly at any resolution/AA setting higher than 1280x1024/no AA, which looks lousy on my 22" widescreen LCD.

:\ :( :mad:

So, I downloaded and ran 3DMark 06. This is when it got really confusing. With SLI disabled, it scored 11,409 @ 1280x1024. Expecting an increase with SLI enabled, I was dismayed to see the score drop to 5684 - less than half.

I've already updated to the latest drivers from EVGA for the mobo and video cards to no avail, so I'm ruling that out for now.

If someone more up-to-date on this SLI stuff has any advice for me, I'd be happy to hear it.
(I've attached the output from 3DMark for reference)

TIA,
WtS
 

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Wonko the Sane said:
I recently built what I thought would be a cutting-edge gaming rig (EVGA 680i LT w/SLI, Core2 Duo E6850, 4 GB RAM, 2 x EVGA 8800 GTX 768 MB, 500 GB HD, Vista Home Premium), but I've been having troubles getting any newer game such as Crysis or UT3 to run smoothly at any resolution/AA setting higher than 1280x1024/no AA, which looks lousy on my 22" widescreen LCD.

:\ :( :mad:

So, I downloaded and ran 3DMark 06. This is when it got really confusing. With SLI disabled, it scored 11,409 @ 1280x1024. Expecting an increase with SLI enabled, I was dismayed to see the score drop to 5684 - less than half.

I've already updated to the latest drivers from EVGA for the mobo and video cards to no avail, so I'm ruling that out for now.

If someone more up-to-date on this SLI stuff has any advice for me, I'd be happy to hear it.
(I've attached the output from 3DMark for reference)

TIA,
WtS
Click to expand...

There were issues for a long time with SLI under Vista, some sort of drivers were supposed to have been released around the middle of '07, but I can't find anything on the problem actually being fixed or working well. YMMV.

While they don't have anything equivalent to the 8800, the ATI Crossfire set up apparently works better under Vista than SLI.

Vista has also been notorious for lower performance with games than XP. If you really want to play games and aren't playing DX10 only games, I'd pick up a copy of XP. I think Newegg sells an OEM copy of XP Pro for around $130 IIRC.
 

Rackhir said:
There were issues for a long time with SLI under Vista, some sort of drivers were supposed to have been released around the middle of '07, but I can't find anything on the problem actually being fixed or working well. YMMV.

While they don't have anything equivalent to the 8800, the ATI Crossfire set up apparently works better under Vista than SLI.

Vista has also been notorious for lower performance with games than XP. If you really want to play games and aren't playing DX10 only games, I'd pick up a copy of XP. I think Newegg sells an OEM copy of XP Pro for around $130 IIRC.
Click to expand...

It's probably worth noting that service pack 1 for Vista was released to manufacturing yesterday, and will be on Windows Update next month.
 


This is a bit of a semi educated guess but looking at the xls file there is one oddity. Your AGP window is 1026Mb which is very high indeed and it might be that if you have two graphics cards on SLI I would imagine that you would have two windows. You are displaying 2.5Gb of physical memory.

I think you should lower that AGP window. The reason is that if you have 4Gb fitted and 2.5 user physical then I guess you have 1.5 for the kernel of which 2x1026 will not fit into it. You should try lowering it - probably drastically as in 32Mb or something like that, just enough to keep the BIOS & driver happy. Some people recommend that big video cards should have very small AGP Apertures. There is logic behind that. However, it might be trying to use that memory as a swap space for texture upload in which case 32 would not be enough and 128 - 256 would be more like it. I know its PCIe and it should not matter but there might have to be a double buffered memory transfer. Unlikely but possible. NVidia forums would be better for this specific info. I have asked that question in the past and I could never get a straight answer.

Anyway, try fiddling with that as it looks way too big.

If you find that this makes it go a lot faster then personally I would also look at the PAE switch and try to get more user mem as games are probably quite hungry for that too. You might be able to get 3.5Gb of user RAM but this is Vista so maybe 3 will max you out.

Hope this helps - sorry its a bit vague, its been a while since I have done this stuff.

Oh... BTW. A user on another forum with dual SLI 8800's found that his Crysis never went ballistic either. He thought there was a problem with that engine and I am fairly sure he worked for a games company. I have no opinion as I have never ran it personally.

Edit - Seems as PAE is already in Vista. So its probably neither of these things.
 
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That's easy to test, just try one card then the other. ;)

Not that it really helps, but in all honesty... you should have bought 1 Ultra (or 2 of the 2nd gen 8800 GTs) not 2 GTX.

Bye
Thanee
 
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You never mentioned what PSU you had. I was told that its 185W idle for a GTX and more if going full tilt like 3DMark would make it. I know that intel CPUs slow down when hot but I am not sure if that is true if they start to run out of power. I don't know what 8800's do either. At any rate you need about 20A on each of the 4 molexes (obviously no power lead daisy chaining...) so an SLI like what you have should be equipped with about a 1KW PSU. There is an nVidia page of 8800 in SLI recommended PSU somewhere...

Ah yes,
http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_build_psu.html
 
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Well, just take out both cards and then put them in seperately and test the performance with each... then you'll see if one of them does not live up to its standard.

Bye
Thanee
 

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