People with GTX 280 running in SLI

[john19055]

I have a Q6600 running at 3240g and a monitor that I game with at 1920x1200 and a BFG GTX 280 OCX and I keep thinking I will get another one and run in SLI.But is it worth it to the people that have it.Do you get a big improvement in games.Or does it just allow you to game at High FSAA and aniso.I can't make up my mind,so I need help one way or the other.Does it scale good or do you need a faster CPU to get the full potenial.

[ChrisRay]

SLI will let you raise the resolution/AA/AF typically. It will vary from game to game. If you dont plan on changing your IQ settings and are getting solid 40-50 FPS already then you probably wont benefit from SLI much.

It very much depends on games though I run everything @ 1680x1050 or 1920x1080 @ 16x/16x and it works very well.


Chris

[john19055]

I run everthing at 1920x1200 and 16x aniso.I would like to run games with Antialiasing Transparency along with High FSAA ,so getting another GTX280 will allow this and not lose my high frame rate I get just gameing at 1920x1200 with 16x aniso.

[XxDeadlyxX]

It is definitely worth it, the games with the most improvement IMO are Crysis and Stalker Clear Sky.

Also it allows me to enable Supersampling using nHancer on slighty older games or games which don't support AA (UT3), and looks awesome

[Cyb3r]

to be honest chris i had varried/mixed results with sli in the past and untill Nvidia finally decides to support Dualview under sli i'm not going to bother anymore....

Oh and my username on the sli forums is the same

[gstanford]

It is a very solid improvement on the 8800GTX SLI setup the GTX280's replaced, while using the same "lowend" (by most enthusiast standards) AMD 6000+ CPU.

If you wish to run a 30" monitor native while maintaining high levels of IQ, then GTX280 is virtually a necessity IMO.

[mailman2]

Are there still framerate dips and micro stutter though? I have ditched both my GX2s because the stutter just killed any performance gains I got. I haven't seen anything from Nvidia trying to address this issue, which imo is a show stopper.

[gstanford]

There will always be framerate dips if you push your graphics solution hard enough, no matter what the PR department of your favorite IHV would like you to believe. Overall I find it pretty smooth, the 1gb of memory per card is a big help. 512mb per card isn't really enough IMO if you are going for hires + high IQ.

I really don't know about microstutter, since I almost exclusively make use of SLI-AA modes which are not prone to micro-stutter, the exception being crysis where I let the app handle the AA, and I can't say I've noticed microstutter there.

[ChrisRay]

Originally Posted by Cyb3r

to be honest chris i had varried/mixed results with sli in the past and untill Nvidia finally decides to support Dualview under sli i'm not going to bother anymore....

Oh and my username on the sli forums is the same

Is that not what I said? Your experience will vary dependent on how GPU limited you are. Despite all this setting up profiles and actually getting game support isn't much of an issue.

[john19055]

I have never notice micro-studder when running SLI maybe I just have bad eyes.I did notice when I was running two 9800GTx in SLI my min frame rate was a lot lower.But I fiqured that was because of the 512mb of memory on the cards.

[Cyb3r]

Chris you misunderstood me totally i'm affraid what i meant with varried results is that in most cases on the old 7800gt's SLI worked the other way around for me worser than with sli off in games that fully supported SLI...

And Nvidia promised Dual monitor SLi support ages ago it's finally there but to be honest i'm still waiting before i will test it.

The other problem is that alot of games are branded as sli supported but have zero SLI support at all it's just forced in the driver and causing more problems than when running without sli on (guildwars came in to my mind when i still played that)