no SLI performance increase with UT2004

[oldkawman]

I see no noticable change or increase in performance with SLI. FC5_64 with driver 100.14.19, the nvidia GUI shows both cards in SLI mode, identical 7950GT cards.

I have tried all 3 in my device section, no increase in performance with UT2004.
"SLI" "1"
"SLI" "AFR"
"SLI" "SFR"
In fact, seems I get a slight 4-5 fps decrease in FPS with it enabled. Hard to tell

I dual boot with XP_64, 169.04 driver, SLI works great on that with the UT3 demo. So I know my hardware works.

Is there something I am missing in my Linux setup?

[blueworm]

UT2003 and UT2004 are notoriously CPU limited. You can test this by changing the graphics quality.
Most games are graphics limited quake3 for example, low quality settings will give you crazy fps, UT200X will not.
This is quite normal.
You are better off testing SLI with ETQW demo.

[AaronP]

I don't think the Linux version of the ETQW demo has the optimized megatexture code, so it's pretty CPU-limited as well.

Make sure you're running your tests at the same resolution as your desktop, or use xrandr to change resolutions before starting the game. Otherwise, the driver has to assume that the screen can be panned at any time and has to disable some optimizations.

[blueworm]

AaronP has a point.

However you could try quake4 that seems to scale well with SLI see this article in Phoronix.

[oldkawman]

Since I dual boot, I installed the UT2004 on my XP_64 drive. Performance under XP_64 in SLI gave 2-3 times higher performance under SLI both in instant action and online. Where I seemed to average 35 fps and could not get above 45 fps under Linux SLI, under XP_64 SLI it goes way over 100 and never drops below 60 fps. This indicates an issue with the nvidia driver or Linux, or both. It runs much better under Linux FC5_64 with a single card than in SLI, but still much lower performance than under XP_64. Very disapointing performance under Linux and even worse under Linux and SLI.

I had initially installed XP_64 just for the UT3 demo. I had to switch to an SLI board to get playable performance with UT3. That made a big negative impact on UT2004 performance. My initial setup was as follows;
Epox NF4 Ultra MB, 2.4 GHz Opteron 180, 2Gig DDR400, 7950GT 512MB
My SLI setup is as follows;
DFI Infinity NF4 SLI, 2.4 GHz Opteron 180, 2Gig DDR400, two 7950GT 512MB in SLI
Everything else is identical except the board and 2nd card. All settings at max and 1600x1200 res.

[energyman76b]

your fps are so low, it looks like something is really wrong. Do you use cool'n'quiet?

Did you do this:
echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

before starting a game of ut2004 in linux?

[blueworm]

^^oldkawman
Comparing win and linux performance in ut200X is kinda unfair, since it uses Direct3D in windows by default, instead of openGL.

[oldkawman]

Originally Posted by energyman76b

your fps are so low, it looks like something is really wrong. Do you use cool'n'quiet?

Did you do this:
echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

before starting a game of ut2004 in linux?

Amazing! What does that do? Significantly the highest fps I have ever seen! Between 150 and 250, usually around 175. Was my CPU freq. turned down?

I found cool'n'quiet was in auto in BIOS, so I disabled it. These are better numbers than I was getting in XP_64.