SLI or save up for new GPU

[Jumper118]

29 minutes ago, Mick Naughty said:

So why is all this personnel preference stuff being argued? People who have never dealt with vram limitations or sli issues yelling others what stuff to buy? Based off what? What they've read? What videos they've watched?

Or some like white knighting for nvidia and want to stop everyone using older hw and sli.  I have people do the same for Intel as well. 

[majsta]

31 minutes ago, Mick Naughty said:

So why is all this personnel preference stuff being argued? People who have never dealt with vram limitations or sli issues yelling others what stuff to buy? Based off what? What they've read? What videos they've watched?

It's ok, We are having a meaningful discussion, just we cant agree what we are discussing about.  its a joke, everyone chill. 
Its not personal preference, I like AMD more than Nvidia but at the moment when I bought GTX 770 the price vise comparison was the R9 280X. And the GTX 770 at that time was better so as much as I like AMD i went for Nvidia that time, simple. 

[Mick Naughty]

That's exactly what personal preference means. Or else we'd all have the exact same rig. 

[sgloux3470]

On 9/16/2016 at 3:05 AM, majsta said:

Guys, I am not sure why you think the 2GB is not enough for 1080p... Hardware Unboxed had a nice comparison on AMD RX 460 2GB vs 4GB and it doesn't make any difference in most of the new titles. 

I hope LMG doesn't kick me out for linking this into the forum

There are certainly situations where you need to lower settings with 2 GB vram cards.  But you'd still be able to run most games with medium/high textures just fine.

 

OP you would be best served by looking at lower end cards.  Instead of a 1070, maybe look at a 1060 or an rx 470/480.  It will still be a large performance boost.

 

 

[sgloux3470]

8 hours ago, Morgan MLGman said:

 

2 hours ago, Morgan MLGman said:

(Batman: Arkham Knight is a perfect example of a recent AAA title that did not have ANY kind of multi-GPU support, despite being heavily sponsored by Nvidia) 

 

 

Actually it can work with some Nvidia inspector tweaks, it just has horrendous graphical artifacts.  The performance boost is there though.  Apparently if you have a dedicated physX card in addition to your SLI set up it removes most of the flickering artifacts.  One guy saw around 80% performance boost over a single card with a SLI + dedicated physX card set up.

 

http://imgur.com/a/lO7Cb

 

 

 

 

[scottyseng]

6 hours ago, majsta said:

-snip-

haha...ah man, I just got a BSOD now. I don't know "Driver Corrupted expool". This one is new. Usually it's clockdog_watchout (because I need to add more juice to keep the overclock). Hmm, I'll hold off on reinstalling windows since I have to move PCs anyway (upgrading to 7700K when it comes out) / my friend is buying my 2500K for a budget build.

 

Yeah, both PSUs are solid.

 

Hmm, Yeah, I'll keep that advice in mind. Hard part is that he hardly cleans the PC...like when I got it to install the SSD, it wasn't cleaned for a year. haha.

 

haha, if they manage to fix the laptop, I'll be amazed.

 

Wow, the thread got filled with a lot of discussion.

[majsta]

12 hours ago, scottyseng said:

haha...ah man, I just got a BSOD now. I don't know "Driver Corrupted expool". This one is new. Usually it's clockdog_watchout (because I need to add more juice to keep the overclock). Hmm, I'll hold off on reinstalling windows since I have to move PCs anyway (upgrading to 7700K when it comes out) / my friend is buying my 2500K for a budget build.

 

Yeah, both PSUs are solid.

 

Hmm, Yeah, I'll keep that advice in mind. Hard part is that he hardly cleans the PC...like when I got it to install the SSD, it wasn't cleaned for a year. haha.

 

haha, if they manage to fix the laptop, I'll be amazed.

 

Wow, the thread got filled with a lot of discussion.

Never heard of that BSOD to be honest, but it sounds like you have some driver problems. If the driver is not working it usually shows in the Device Manager as an exclamation mark. It might not be, still worth checking it out. 

He needs to clean his PC at least 2 times a year IMO, its not that hard, a can of compressed air and 1h of work, tell him not to be so lazy  ore he will lose his PC. 

And talking about PSU stability. I had a power surge from the wall outlet last night. I swear my hart skipped a bit, I thought the PC was a goner. But ASUS MAXIMUS HERO VI power protection kicked in, I thank the god for not picking up a cheaper board. If not for overclocking it sure payed of now. 

No news on the laptop still, they asked for password on the laptop, I guess they are working on it but the problems start when they log into windows  > They are in for a party of BSOD all around.

 

Yes this thread went into a lot of different directions. Some heated discussions with myself included in most of them. I like talking to you guys, a lot of useful info to be heard. 

[Morgan MLGman]

20 hours ago, majsta said:

You are missing the point once again. I am not arguing about who has a bigger .... card. 

 

YES, Nvidia guys are dicks for pushing the SLI, I agree. AMD done away with the crossfire bridge/cable long time ago, and technology is similar, multygpu support on both sides, Nvidia can adopt the idea but they wont. I am sure you know how important it is to push your ideas and be the leader in IT and both you and I know they will never abandon SLI. We can go on if one or the other is better but that is not the point here. My point is and always has been from the beginning that I can get 50% performance benefit with SLI, and I know you will agree on this with me. 

Now, Lets get back to the basics of the problem. I am running 1080p at 60Hz monitor. I am NOT GOING TO UPGRADE TO 1440p any time soon, as I said, maybe never as I find this just enough for my daily use, and as I said, at the moment I don't care about the power draw and/or temps because the cards run just fine in my setup. So please don't pull up charts on 1440p gaming on the cards. I know You are bringing up a point about better hardware there and this is a valid comparison, but just remember that R7 200 and R9 200 series are refresh same as GTX 700 is on the GTX 600 models. And also Yes, AMD cards tend to get better as the time passes by, but, that is just due to pore driver support in the past at release (I hear that they have improved a lot in the last year). So these cards come into their place after few iterations on the drivers, but at release they suck . And I had AMD card previous to this system, don't get me started on drivers for Windows, and not to mention the drivers for Ubuntu. Getting a bit of topic here. 

 

To run games at 1080P 60FPS, two-way SLI on GTX 770 2GB OC MSI is more than enough. That is my opinion and I don't see any valid proof to prove otherwise except for few games which we can argue if they are valid. (Hitman -> all Nvidia cards run like crap compared to AMD, And Batman: <insert any title here > are just plain shit when it comes to implementation, we can agree both both on AMD and Nvidia cards) As I said DOOM and Tomb Raider, If I can't play them at MAX + AA I will drop the AA and or bring down the graphics slider, but I think I can, but without proof I can't say for sure. 

 

Working in IT sure relates to this topic. Most of the people tend to blabber (I am NOT SAYING you are one of them) about things they hear or read online and not really get into the core of the problem or technology. They don't do research on the topic, they don't have good understanding on how CPU/GPU or anything else works, they don't follow up on new technologies, and most important of all they didn't even try and code something, ever, not even "Hello World". And not to mention they don't know what polygons, textures, shaders, texels, are and how GPU uses them. And I was telling you this to address the statement you made on devs don't have to work on support for SLI/CrossFire. They do. We do, from my own experience, in our software we have support for DX9, DX10 and DX11 (i know it is not the same thing as SLI but bear with me here), but you have to have support on both sides if you want your product to be the best, and to work the best on any crap hardware (GTX 770), and you do, not just driver support on manufacturer side (I didn't forget the Nvidia and AMD devs, i just figured it is considered by default). 

 

So as one IT guy to another can we agree that I can get 50% performance from SLI, and that I can "tweak" the games to have 1080p 60FPS with VSync on? 

This has gone way out of the initial topic. Should have asked is GTX 770 SLI enough for 1080p 60FPS on High/MAX settings. 

I'll respond to that later, I'm watching a good BF1 video, watch at around 4:40 when he starts talking about 2GB RX 460 and 4GB RX 460 in BF1:

 

He talks about it for around a minute, worth listening:

 

[majsta]

On 10/20/2016 at 1:50 PM, Morgan MLGman said:

I'll respond to that later, I'm watching a good BF1 video, watch at around 4:40 when he starts talking about 2GB RX 460 and 4GB RX 460 in BF1:

 

He talks about it for around a minute, worth listening:

 

Sorry for the late response, wasn't on the forum for a couple of days.
I agree with him 100% in this case, and with you for that matter. In BF1 2GB is not enough on 1080p Ultra, case and point here. But still, when switching to 1080p on high setting the drop is less than on ultra, and I just want to remind you of my previous statement. Difference between High and Ultra is barely noticeable on 1080p if any. And I always come back to the power of the GPU, higher bandwidth on GTX 770, so it will output more FPS for sure, 2 of them will go over 60 FPS with ease, maybe even on ultra. Only problem that I might experience is occasional frame dips (like it is explained in some of the previous videos, but I wouldn't know until I test it) so that could ruin the experience, but without the test, we cant say for sure. 

[majsta]

On 10/19/2016 at 8:28 PM, scottyseng said:

haha...ah man, I just got a BSOD now. I don't know "Driver Corrupted expool". This one is new. Usually it's clockdog_watchout (because I need to add more juice to keep the overclock). Hmm, I'll hold off on reinstalling windows since I have to move PCs anyway (upgrading to 7700K when it comes out) / my friend is buying my 2500K for a budget build.

 

Yeah, both PSUs are solid.

 

Hmm, Yeah, I'll keep that advice in mind. Hard part is that he hardly cleans the PC...like when I got it to install the SSD, it wasn't cleaned for a year. haha.

 

haha, if they manage to fix the laptop, I'll be amazed.

 

Wow, the thread got filled with a lot of discussion.

I just wanted to give you an update about the laptop.

   So the repair shop couldn't do anything, as expected. They had the same problem as me and the person taking a look into it was frustrated same as me and after 4 days, nothing happened. They are a great repair shop, but just, they couldn't do anything, so they returned the laptop and didn't charge me a thing so... Yeah.

Just not working still, behaves the same. 

 

PS: I will try and replace the CMOS battery, but, this is a desperate attempt. 

[Brooksie359]

On 10/18/2016 at 10:31 AM, majsta said:

I disagree and here is why. The amount of VRAM used in games is not affected by the speed of the GPU.

The amount of data that is stored in VRAM is dictated by the scene that is being rendered. So for heavy scenes (open world games, with lots of different textures) this data amount tends to be fairly huge. Still if the game is well optimized that data is compressed to take less space and if the game engine used to create the world is any good it will have smaller textures for rendering far away scene parts. In case of same games (e.g. any Batman PC game (trollface)), pore optimization can crush even the best video cards and CPU-s. 

Second thing to note is the bandwidth of the GPU. So even if the card doesn't have the texture it requires at the moment with high bandwidth on the card (e.g. 4096 on HBM memory on R9 nano card, and it only has 4GB) you still get the best performance in good games. And not to mention the pre-fetch of data that happens when playing games (e.g. playing platformers, a simple example, you can only go left or right so the next scene is the one to the left or the one to the right and you can get these scenes prepared before you need them) which further more decreases the ram needed as you can clear the unused data (previous scenes). And the fetch of the data is done by CPU from disk to RAM and then the card takes over from ram to VRAM. 
So my point being, while it is nice to have that extra VRAM it really depends on the game at the end. 

When someone says that a card isn't fast enough to utilize 4gb of vram it means exactly that. the card can't get any utility from the extra 2gb of vram because the vram is going to get all the data it needs far faster than the GPU can process it. now with the type of performance 2 gtx 770s would give they could definitely utilize more than 2bg of vram pretty easily. I mean the gtx 960 saw a performance increase when going from 2gb to 4gb and one gtx 770 has very similar performance to a gtx 960 so I'd say it will make a difference the real question is how much of a difference and in what games.

[majsta]

1 hour ago, Brooksie359 said:

When someone says that a card isn't fast enough to utilize 4gb of vram it means exactly that. the card can't get any utility from the extra 2gb of vram because the vram is going to get all the data it needs far faster than the GPU can process it. now with the type of performance 2 gtx 770s would give they could definitely utilize more than 2bg of vram pretty easily. I mean the gtx 960 saw a performance increase when going from 2gb to 4gb and one gtx 770 has very similar performance to a gtx 960 so I'd say it will make a difference the real question is how much of a difference and in what games.

As far as I can see on 90% of the titles out there 2vs4GB doesn't mean a thing. The difference that you mention may be visible in frame drops from time to time, so I would expect it affects min values more than average. 

[laushik]

61 Replies, Damnnn!