SLI performance

[Ryios]

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.

[aggiegamer09]

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

[Ryios]

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.

[aggiegamer09]

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

[Kantide]

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.

[Ryios]

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).

[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.

[aggiegamer09]

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!

[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.

[Dhalmel]

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.