980Ti overclocking

LooneyJuice · May 21, 2016

1 hour ago, Joveice said:

Yeah it doesn't sound like much, granted, but if say, you gain a 10% bump, and you're every in a pickle with a game due to performance, getting even a 10% bump means that a 55 FPS becomes a 60 or a marginal 60 keeps you well above that. That's my point of doing it. Others go for pure benchmark scores, or the knowledge that you've extracted every ounce of performance. And 10% is usually average ballpark gain on Maxwell (assuming of course you're not already on a very highly overclocked edition like an EVGA FTW f.ex). But in any case, that's the gist of it, you saw how it works, you went through the methodology, if and when you ever need the extra boost it's there. Nonetheless, you're still on a flagship product essentially, and even with the advent of Pascal, you're still going to be riding up there, so yeah, it's not like you're hurting

Joveice · May 21, 2016

57 minutes ago, LooneyJuice said:

Yeah it doesn't sound like much, granted, but if say, you gain a 10% bump, and you're every in a pickle with a game due to performance, getting even a 10% bump means that a 55 FPS becomes a 60 or a marginal 60 keeps you well above that. That's my point of doing it. Others go for pure benchmark scores, or the knowledge that you've extracted every ounce of performance. And 10% is usually average ballpark gain on Maxwell (assuming of course you're not already on a very highly overclocked edition like an EVGA FTW f.ex). But in any case, that's the gist of it, you saw how it works, you went through the methodology, if and when you ever need the extra boost it's there. Nonetheless, you're still on a flagship product essentially, and even with the advent of Pascal, you're still going to be riding up there, so yeah, it's not like you're hurting

Yea, my target was to stop dropping under 144, but that dident work out so I'm now looking for a new Gigabyte G1 Gaming NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB.

Which I think will do the trick If I run them in SLI, Btw how much performance can I get with 2 of this card? like in Boost will it be 100% boost or a 60% etc, since if it's like 20% I see no point of doing it becouse of the price tag.

LooneyJuice · May 21, 2016

Did you OC both memory and core? Admittedly the gains depend on the software too. Also, SLI is another bag of cats entirely. It seems like a good idea at the time, but a lot of the multi-GPU rendering implementation is up to the software devs and not Nvidia, and when it doesn't work, it's wasted hardware. In fact mentioned this in another thread so:

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First off, I'm not trying to rain on your parade, but there are plenty of warnings out there, so I'm only going to reiterate what's out there. SLI (or xfire for that matter) can be a great way to increase performance when you want to add another GPU of the same type to your system, and it sounds like a great idea, but only if it works and scales properly. When it doesn't, that's when you have diminishing returns, and for any amount of time you can't run the second GPU, you basically have a very expensive heating unit in your case.

The most expensive single GPU you can buy at any time is always going to be the better, hassle free option, because you'll have an overall more powerful single GPU that runs at full capacity rather than a more "mediocre" single GPU running out of 2 in SLI when the game does not support it. So, yes, to answer your question, SLI isn't supported in as many games as you thought, unfortunately. It's a very niche market according to numbers, and most devs prefer to code for 1 GPU. And there are many other caveats to being an SLI setup owner.

That being said, you already pulled the trigger, so you can only make the best of it, and when it does work, you can see the performance gain.

So, for starters, as stated above, it really works on a game by game basis. For one, you now have to stay on top of driver releases which may contain SLI profiles. Additionally, you'll have to sometimes do some snooping around to see whether a game implicitly or explicitly supports SLI. If the former is true, sometimes you can get some performance out of the SLI AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) submodes, or you can even have the second GPU as a dedicated PhysX processor. It's not hard to do, SLI rendering mode is in one of your screenies even. If said game explicitly supports SLI, then it's all supposed to work out of the box. Other than that, you don't have to worry about other quality settings in there unless there's a specific problem with a game. SLI will not change basic functionality. If you just don't have the horsepower for it, you just tweak in-game settings as usual. Also How are you monitoring VRAM usage? If it's via MSI AB (or RTSS for that matter) when in SLI/Xfire, depending on the title, it might report double the VRAM usage because of the 2 cards. Even though you still only have 4GB effective. So basically, if AB reports 4.2GB of VRAM usage for example, in all actuality you're using about 2.1 basically.

So the gist of it is:

1. Stay on top of driver releases

2. Check which games support SLI

3. If games do not have explicit support, play with SLI submodes in your game profile and observe performance

4. Worst case scenario, some games will be so bad with it on, you'll have to switch it off completely via game profile

Note: I hope you also have the motherboard for it, because if i recall correctly SLI unlike Xfire does not want to work on anything lower than a x8 pcie slot. Some budget boards really kill that second slot.

And because I haven't done SLI for a while, and my prior multi-GPU setup was utilizing XFire, if anyone else spots something I've missed, please chime in.

Additionally, no, you very rarely get anywhere near twice the performance. If you're lucky you can maybe expect a 70-80% bump, but that's about it. Synthetic benchmarks will always show better scaling too than actual games. So, if you want to do it just to push consistently past 144 on a few of your titles, it's a question of whether those titles even support SLI. In any case, I wouldn't recommend it as SLI is very temperamental. Other than that though, it's your budget, and if you want to just grab a second one, by all means.

Joveice · May 21, 2016

1 minute ago, LooneyJuice said:

Did you OC both memory and core? Admittedly the gains depend on the software too. Also, SLI is another bag of cats entirely. It seems like a good idea at the time, but implementation is up to the devs, and when it doesn't work, it's wasted hardware. In fact mentioned this in another thread so:

Additionally, no, you very rarely get anywhere near twice the performance. If you're lucky you can maybe expect a 70-80% bump, but that's about it. Synthetic benchmarks will always show better scaling too than actual games. So, if you want to do it just to push consistently past 144 on a few of your titles, it's a question of whether those titles even support SLI. In any case, I wouldn't recommend it as SLI is very temperamental. Other than that though, it's your budget, and if you want to just grab a second one, by all means.

Hm, I clocked the core only, but if I'm able to get stable on 144 I would buy another 980Ti since all my games support SLI, only one game doesent but it's far from GPU demanding.

LooneyJuice · May 21, 2016

I can sort of justify it in that sense I guess. If you've tailored your usage around specific pieces of software (say f.ex AAA titles that are better SLI candidates) and you're trying to hit a framerate target and give yourself some headroom, then I guess it sort of makes sense. On the other hand though, we're talking about this near Pascal availability, and even a single 1080 pips a 980ti, although admittedly not even close to the difference to necessitate another upgrade now. If you can hold on for maybe a 1080ti / GP100, I'd wager that's a better option, even if you're going to mainly be playing AAA titles. Because as we've seen, many of them these days are a messy bag of crap occasionally, which far from cater to more niche tech like SLI. Again, I'm thinking more bulletproof hassle-free operation regardless of scenario, rather than peak performance in fewer cases for the immediate future.