Using SLI with Star Citizen

[Thalstan]

Has anyone been able to successfully use SLI on two 690s? My wife and I had the same video cards, so when I upgraded her card to a GTX 980 Ti, we moved her old 690 to my box. Unfortunately, I have not been experiencing very good results when trying to use SLI, even on low graphics setting. In fact, my performance decreases in SLI mode. I can run low or medium setting on a single GPU and not have any issues, but when I move to SLI I get flickering (it goes away eventually and it's something I can live with), but more critically, I get stutter/video lag in flight. This is especially true when I have other ships/stations come into view.

I would rather hold off on a new video card until around the winter holidays or next year around Dads and Grads time (June) depending on when Squadron 42 releases and I build my new rig (new rig will be designed specifically to run Star Citizen/Squad 42, so I may even push it back until next year Christmas if Squad 42 releases winter '17) That said, this is a beautiful game and I would love to see it in something other than low graphics mode. Can anyone help

My Rig
Core i7-3770K @3.5 GHz
32 GB Ram
Windows 10 Pro
Nvidia GTX 690 (x2) for quad SLI
Nvidia Driver 372.90
Asus Z77 Sabertooth (Supports Quad SLI)
Game disk is 500Gb SSD
OS is on a separate 500 GB SSD

 

[BUTUZ]

Not sure if applicable to Nvidia SLI - but I have tried it with AMD Crossfire (same sorta thing) and it doesn't work well, depending on the settings it will either look good and no speed increase, or you get great speed increase and terrible flickering / colour changes.

The game has to be optimised for SLI/Crossfire, don't think it is.

Solid advice in my long years of experience is, you are almost always better off with one more powerful card, rather than two weak cards.

Have you thought about selling both 690s and using the proceeds to be buying something like a 980/1060/1070?

 

[NoTick]

Make sure to walk through the nVidia advanced settings in the control panel and have everything activated for SLI. (Link below walks through this)
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001167.htm

Also, make sure you used the correct two slots on your Asus Sabertooth - SLi board, it has specific layouts depending on whether you're using 2 or 3 cards. (Looking at the manual for your board, make sure it's in slots 2 & 4 - E.g. PCI-E 16x 1 PCI-E 16x 2 - so pretty standard)

The only real advantage to running this card in SLi is the added VRAM from the second card. You probably won't see much of an increase in actual performance (maybe 5-15%). The GTX690 being a dual GPU card already, it's a pretty power hungry thing. You're basically running 4 GPU's with this in SLI - and that isn't optimized for a lot of stuff. SLI optimization typically assumes two single-gpu cards.

 

[Thalstan]

Yeah, well, doesn't matter anyway, my OS SSD ate itself on shutdown (with help from Microsoft), so it's get a new SSD and re-install time...

Yeah, I MIGHT be able to repair it, but it's the second time the SSD has had this issue, so I am going to replace and do a fresh install. See you all in the verse

 

[NoTick]

Yeah, well, doesn't matter anyway, my OS SSD ate itself on shutdown (with help from Microsoft), so it's get a new SSD and re-install time...

Yeah, I MIGHT be able to repair it, but it's the second time the SSD has had this issue, so I am going to replace and do a fresh install. See you all in the verse

Not surprising - a lot of folks had the windows-update-of-death with the Anniversary update. My mothers PC shit the bed as well - I had to completely reformat her hard-drive and re-install windows to recover it.

 

[Eamon_Flannigan]

Has anyone been able to successfully use SLI on two 690s? My wife and I had the same video cards, so when I upgraded her card to a GTX 980 Ti, we moved her old 690 to my box. Unfortunately, I have not been experiencing very good results when trying to use SLI, even on low graphics setting. In fact, my performance decreases in SLI mode. I can run low or medium setting on a single GPU and not have any issues, but when I move to SLI I get flickering (it goes away eventually and it's something I can live with), but more critically, I get stutter/video lag in flight. This is especially true when I have other ships/stations come into view.

I would rather hold off on a new video card until around the winter holidays or next year around Dads and Grads time (June) depending on when Squadron 42 releases and I build my new rig (new rig will be designed specifically to run Star Citizen/Squad 42, so I may even push it back until next year Christmas if Squad 42 releases winter '17) That said, this is a beautiful game and I would love to see it in something other than low graphics mode. Can anyone help

My Rig
Core i7-3770K @3.5 GHz
32 GB Ram
Windows 10 Pro
Nvidia GTX 690 (x2) for quad SLI
Nvidia Driver 372.90
Asus Z77 Sabertooth (Supports Quad SLI)
Game disk is 500Gb SSD
OS is on a separate 500 GB SSD

I have the same flickering that you mentioned, I also noticed the screen tearing and occasional artifacts, but once I switched to windowed mode it is a marginal improvement over single card fullscreen. Just my experience, try windowed mode in SLI.

4790K @ 4.6Ghz
2x EVGA Hybrid TitanX
32G DDR3 2400Mhz G skill Trident X