SLI performance

So is it just that I dont have my system configured correctly or is the game just not optimized for Nvidia SLI.

I have 2 GTX 770's in SLI mode, when running the benchmark during beta testing I noticed that GPU utiliztion was around 60% on both GPU's and I had an insanely high Avg frame rate on max setting. Now in the actual game, I have no problem really with frame rate (smooth 60 almost everywhere) but I notice that my GPU utilization is not anywhere close to what it was in the benchmark. GPU 1 is running around 70% and GPU 2 is running around 4% (never goes higher than 4%). So if anyone could share some knowledge on this topic I would greatly appreciate it!

Update:

OK I think i fixed it everyone! what I did was went an re-installed the latest stable NVIDIA drivers ( I was currently running the latest beta drivers) during the re-install I clicked custom install, at the bottom of the screen i clicked clean install. It installed the drivers, felt like the very first time i installed the cards, then went into the nvidia control panel and enabled SLI. I loaded the game with the visual indicators on and now I can verify that SLI is enabled and that my GPU utilization is running as expected!

Thanks for all the valuable input! It sure was frustrating me!

Thanks Ryios!

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Originally Posted by aggiegamer09

So is it just that I dont have my system configured correctly or is the game just not optimized for Nvidia SLI.

I have 2 GTX 770's in SLI mode, when running the benchmark during beta testing I noticed that GPU utiliztion was around 60% on both GPU's and I had an insanely high Avg frame rate on max setting. Now in the actual game, I have no problem really with frame rate (smooth 60 almost everywhere) but I notice that my GPU utilization is not anywhere close to what it was in the benchmark. GPU 1 is running around 70% and GPU 2 is running around 4% (never goes higher than 4%). So if anyone could share some knowledge on this topic I would greatly appreciate it!

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CPU. You can have 4 way SLI and it won't change the fact that MMos are CPU wh***. Nevertheless, I would check Nvidia forums if I were you :).

1) Make sure you have a very recent driver from nVidia and that SLI is still enabled.
2) The benchmark is not capped to 60 FPS like the game is, it'll use your GPU(s) until it or some other component (usually CPU) becomes the bottleneck.
3) If you rerun the benchmark, make sure you have the latest version.

I have an AMD 8 core processor..not sure im bottlenecking at that point..and I am running the latest drivers from Nvidia. Is anyone else seeing more than 4% usage on the second GPU?

I have 2 GTX 560's in SLI, and their performance combined is almost the same as having just 1 card. I can't tell the difference. It seems SE hasn't made the game compatible with SLI.

The game isn't utilizing SLI very well.

SLI works perfectly. Ive tested it with their own SLI guage that you can enable from the control panel. Also I use some other third party apps.

You can enable the multi GPU visual indicator by going to the 3d settings tab at the top of the Nvidia COntrol Panel window and enabling it. Load a game and you will see a green bar on the side of the screen. If they remain even up and down your good. If ones only running and the other isnt doing anything then your cards arent running sli. Check your "configure Multi GPU tab to make sure its on.

Have you verified you 2 cards are set for SLI in your nvidia control panel. I had that issue once where it disabled duel card for single card mode. That was long ago though.

My utilization maxes out around 60 - 70% because I have the frames limited to 60fps so its not gonna work any harder then it has to. Remember above 60FPS is primarily for benchmarking and bragging rights lol.

I have also disabled 1 GPU and confirm a noticeable drop in FPS....so imo it seems to be working fine..at least for some.

so you are seeing 60-70% utilization on both GPU's?? I will double check all of my settings! thats awesome if its working for you!

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Originally Posted by aggiegamer09

so you are seeing 60-70% utilization on both GPU's?? I will double check all of my settings! thats awesome if its working for you!

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Indeed i am :) Good luck getting things working. Make sure your SLI bridge is securely attached as well. Turn off your system remove the bridge and re connect it just to make sure.

ok well that weird! in the benchmark its clearly running in SLI visual indicators show that. but after i load the actual game up i get to visual indicators and seems to not be in SLI

Set Forced Rendering Frames to 2, that forces it to use sli and see if you get the same numbers. If you don't and it works, then the driver you have is not detecting FFXIV as a SLI game. In which case you should Get GForce Experience or w/e it's called and check if it has any new game profiles. Also make sure you are using the latest stable driver.

Also, I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure SLI doesn't kick in for heavy use until it's needed. It's quite possible your 1 770 can handle the load and isn't giving the 2nd card much work to do. With a 770 gtx your bottleneck will be your CPU. If your CPU can't work fast enough to load the card you will lag, but it's not your GPU causing it.

Think of it like 1 boss and 10 workers. Let's say there is enough work to do for 9 workers, but your boss is only capable of coordinating it for 5 people. In which case you see the obvious, there is work to be done not getting done. So you will think your workers are not good enough and you need more. But in reality you need another manager or boss capable of allocating all of the work to the workers efficiently, or to replace the boss outright with a better one.

If your CPU is maxing out on all of it's cores (the boss), it's not capable of loading the GPU (the worker(s)) fast enough, so they are under load, you see some lag here and there, but you don't need more GPU's you need a better CPU. You need both, just upgrading your GPU isn't going to work forever.

For an MMO the best upgrades you can buy is

-a Blazing Fast CPU (higher the clock speed the better) e.g. I5-2500k overclocked to 4.8 ghz (you can get these under $300)
-an efficient powerful GPU (good workers) like your 770.
-A really good nic. The nic is what drives all the triggers that run the game, Killer Nics are decent but overkill. Some onboard nics like some realteks are complete trash. Onboard intel nics are pretty good. Ideally you want your nic to do as much of it's own processing as possible to prevent the CPU from picking up all of the load. Cheap nics make the CPU do everything, good nics do a lot of the processing on the Nics CPU. And absolutely do not run WIFI, you are gimping yourself if you do, Unless your on a laptop hanging out in your hammock in the backyard, use a nic and an ethernet cable.

I guess i should have listed my specs first

AMD 8150 8 Core 4.0 ghz
120GB SSD
2 GTX 770's SLI
Verizon FIOS 75/35


the more i mess around with the more i think its a software thing on my end. many of my games are showing the SLI visual indicator and perfoming just like I would like them to. Once is load FFXIV I loose the visual indicator and notice the performance hit

Also, to the 8 Core AMD Processor, which one do you have.

More cores isn't always better. FFXIV isn't effcient on multi core processors. What it needs the most is 1 Really Fast Core, multi cores are just for secondary threads, which the game doesn't do a whole lot of all the time. 90% of the work happens on the primary game thread where the game loop is. So the faster you can get the main core the better. It's for this reason that Intel outperforms Amd because Intel's Turbo Technology will actually step down cores on low load and speed up the core on high load. Also 2nd/4rd gen intel i5's over clock really really high on a 50$ water cooler or even the stock air fan. The average i5-2500k can overclock to 4.5ghz stable with some being capable of 5ghz.

If you have a budget 8 core FX amd processor, it's probably around 3 to 3.5 ghz per core. Where as you could have gotten the quad core vishera at 4.2 ghz for the same price or cheaper and ended up with a better CPU for FFXIV (mmo's and most games). There are 8 core processors now up over 4.2 ghz, if you have one of those you might be ok. But looking at the benchmark charts, the i5-2500k still beats every one of them and it's been around since 2011.

yeah i have mine overclocked to 4.0ghz i understand what your saying though

It's not just you or SLi, it's the game. I run crossfire and have similar results. If it wasn;t for the crossfire bug having my second GPU show 99% both would be at 70ish. Also, the game should be running much smoother but it barely looks any better than me running 1 card.

I am on 7970s mind you with them OC'ed to 1080/1450.

It's your nvidia settings, add ffxiv.exe to your applications in the nvidia control panel and force it to run sli. Sounds like you don't have the application profile for FFXIV. So like I said get Geforce Experience (new app from nvidia) and use it to make sure you have the latest profiles. If there isn't one for FFXIV you will need to make it yourself and set frame rendering mode to 2 (forced).

Also to crossfire... AMD just recently game out with the long awaited Frame Pacing driver to fix crossfire, have you updated your drivers in the last 30 days?

Furtherfore, dollar for dollar, ffxiv runs better on nvidia cards than it does on amd cards. A 760GTX for 250$ will run the game better than a $300 amd card. Just look for all the benchmarks, I was in the benchmark thread back in beta, and I noticed that every amd I could find was getting beat by it's equivalent nvidia card. I don't know why but I think it's because nvidia cards have phsx processors and take some load off the CPU.

OK I think i fixed it everyone! what I did was went an re-installed the latest stable NVIDIA drivers ( I was currently running the latest beta drivers) during the re-install I clicked custom install, at the bottom of the screen i clicked clean install. It installed the drivers, felt like the very first time i installed the cards, then went into the nvidia control panel and enabled SLI. I loaded the game with the visual indicators on and now I can verify that SLI is enabled and that my GPU utilization is running as expected!

Thanks for all the valuable input! It sure was frustrating me!

Thanks Ryios!

Glad I could help,

Let me mention one final thing a lot of people don't know.

If you are running Windows 8, the metro UI and the UI in general uses DirectX, and it Forces Vertical Sync to be on, you cannot turn it off. As such, if you run FFXIV in a window (even a borderless window) virtual sync will be on even if you tell nvidia to turn it off, The OS overrides anything you tell it about vertical sync, therefore when running the game in a window you will never see your FPS go higher than your monitor's refresh rate (usually 60).

Only way around that at the moment, that I know of, is to go back to windows 7.

This is why running the benchmark for FFXI on windows 8 in a window performs so much worse than full screen. When in full screen you can turn vertical sync off, but not windowed.

Hopefulyl MS will patch in a way to turn vertical sync off on the OS UI so we don't have to deal with that.

It's a shame too, because windows 8 has a faster kernel than 7 and performs better in fullscreen mode than windows 7. So for me, I stuck with windows 8, run the game windowed, and just deal with the 60 fps cap, not a big deal since my 760 can handle it.

SLI works fine for me on the latest beta driver on Windows 8.1


Unless you've set your frame cap limit to unlocked or run at a very large resolution (2560*1440+) you shouldn't see 90~100% gpu usage that often. If you have the game's fps capped at 60 the gpu is only going to utilize the needed process for what the client demands.

Honestly the game with this kind of visual quality (at the technical side) doesn't really push a single 680 much let alone SLU configuration, maybe when the DX11/texture update is made available.

On windows 8, if you run the game windowed you are capped at 60 no matter what. Because the Desktop Windows Manager in windows 8 overrides driver settings for vsync and forces it to stay on all the time. The only way around it is windows 7 or run games full screen.

Also make sure you are running in true fullscreen. Not fullscreen borderless or whatever its called.

You probably are in true fullscreen just throwing ideas out there of things to check.

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Originally Posted by Ryios

Also to crossfire... AMD just recently game out with the long awaited Frame Pacing driver to fix crossfire, have you updated your drivers in the last 30 days?

Furtherfore, dollar for dollar, ffxiv runs better on nvidia cards than it does on amd cards. A 760GTX for 250$ will run the game better than a $300 amd card. Just look for all the benchmarks, I was in the benchmark thread back in beta, and I noticed that every amd I could find was getting beat by it's equivalent nvidia card. I don't know why but I think it's because nvidia cards have phsx processors and take some load off the CPU.

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Frampacing doesn't work on DX9 titles yet. Also, it doesn't work on resolutions higher than 2560x1440 at the moment. I happen to play at 6048x1200. AMD cards seem to run this game just fine though as on a single monitor on one card I get over 100fps easy. Go figure.

FWIW - SLI doesn't work when using NVSurround. Atleast not in the benchmark (and im not reformatting my pc and installing the game until I have SLI working there first as I have no reason to believe the game will be any different)

I have quad titans and I get 4k @ 4680x2560 lol. It worked in the past and I got about 12k but between then and now something has stopped SLI from triggering completely. I recently discovered the visual SLI indicator which just adds proof to the pudding so to speak. It shows up in 3dmark, valley, heaven w/e else I choose to run but something for some reason with the FFXIV benchmark isn't letting SLI work.

again, this has something to do w/ surround because if I change to 1 monitor POOF SLI and SLI indicator works fine and the performance that comes along with it.

I didn't build a quad titan rig for 30 fps >.< help!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by aggiegamer09

I have an AMD 8 core processor..not sure im bottlenecking at that point..and I am running the latest drivers from Nvidia. Is anyone else seeing more than 4% usage on the second GPU?

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I'm not bottlenecking, but I do notice it only does so well with my 8 core at Odin/Behemoth...your typical MMo slowdown, mostly because nothing out ther egame wise is optimized for anythgin more than 4 cores if you're lucky. I got the 8 core because I am not an overclocker and the speed was right. lol

Quote:

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Originally Posted by aggiegamer09

I guess i should have listed my specs first

AMD 8150
120GB SSD
2 GTX 770s SLI
Verizon FIOS 75/35


the more i mess around with the more i think its a software thing on my end. many of my games are showing the SLI visual indicator and perfoming just like I would like them to. Once is load FFXIV I loose the visual indicator and notice the performance hit

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Have you found a fix for this get? This is my exact situation. Im running quad titans and surround and I get sli and indicator in everything but ffxiv and ffxiv benchmark. No indicator and I get 30fps from 4 titans which is clearly unacceptable lol.

Im dying to play the game but not going to bother until the PC I built specifically to do so is working right Not enough people use sli or surround to draw attention to it and nvidia doesnt communicate with the people who put food on their table so Im afraid it could take months to fix this and the game is already months old.

TTT aggiegamer09 hollatchaboy!

FTR and for anyone who comes across this with a similar issue... after working w/ the guys at NVidia - they were able to reproduce it in the lab. They are now working on a fix. MUCH time wasted in denying the problem and/or assuming it was on the customers end BUT hats off to Josh at Nvidia for giving me the benefit of the doubt. He worked with me to confirm I did put my legwork in and wasn't crazy/ignorant (god knows they likely get MANY such cases. Anyhow its now out of my hands.

2 dozen reformats and a couple weeks later >.<