FINALLY FOUND IT .. and do i feel a little silly. ENVIRONMENTAL REFLECTIONS for some reason kills my Dual 580s in SLi. When i drop to single card i have no such issues. All other settings to the absoulte max with single or dual. ENVIRONMENTAL reflection off and i have a good time. Can anyone highlight why? Or can ISI double check what they are doing in SLi thats different to single card? Oh and guys, before you flog me to death, i fully understand its beta.
that's crazy that anything could kill 2 580's... if I spent that money I would expect to beat big blue at chess.
That's really weird considering I don't have the same issue with 9800GT's in SLI and environment reflections on :S
Easy to do on many new/newer games if your cranking aa to real high levels and using modes other than/on top of standard msaa or transparency aa. I used to have an hd 6990 and my friend currently has a gtx 590 (pretty much 2 downclocked gtx580s in sli), its hilarious how you can have 100fps with like 16 or 24x aa, then as soon as you start turning on EQ sampling mode, edget detect, this mode aa, that mode aa, etc etc etc, and the next thing you know you got like 30fps lol. Not saying thats what jonchard is doing, not at all. Just saying its easy to kill any card/cards if your going crazy with aa. (Some aa settings are supposedly better than others so people turn them on, but many times in many games they will destroy frames and make the game look no better, or barely barely barely better). There were countless times when I would go flick the EQ switch on and loose frames but notice no improvements at all, go to narrow or wide tent on my 6990 which destroys frames, and the image wouldnt look better at all, then i even tried stacking the EQ setting on, on top of selecting narrow tent or wide tent that killed frames even more and there wasnt even a freaking image quality improvement. So I went back to adaptive mode aa (transparency aa for nvidia users), selected "box" instead of "narrow tent", "wide tent" or "edge detect" (box is the normal default for aa), swtiched the EQ mode to OFF, frames were back in the 100ish range, smoother aswell and looked identical. The only thing that looked better was when i turned every option off and just set it to super sampling, with super sampling 4x looks even better than 16x of any other aa lol, but it kills aa too much. What i said above about all the different aa modes, options settings etc having no effect on image quality when they are supposed to is not always right though. All games and everyones computers are different. For example, some games you really do get an improvement when you turn on edge detect, or use edge detect and/or EQ mode to get closer to super sampling but without as much loss in image quality. Its all about messing with all the different aa options, and on top of that trying to get the best combo of which modes and what to turn on and off with eachother to get the best image quality with the least amount of loss. Ive helped some of my friends with their pcs by messing with all their aa modes/settings, they had a bad combo of all different settings that werent needed when the other was needed (again this can change depending on game) and I made a noticeable increase in their frames per second with no image quality decrease just by messing with all the aa modes, settings, amount of sample rate 2x 4x 8x etc etc depending on what modes and options they were using. they were very happy.
Spinelli, thanks for the comments. I leave the control panel for NV well alone. I only add settings from the game itself. Things will comes good eventually, but i wanted to see some GFX optimisations as there are a few faults in my opinion like perfect on single card, knackered on duals! If duals were working, then my 3 screen set up would be playable and lots of fun!! As it is, i'll wait until they get it a little more sorted. Fingers crossed at the next update - chop chop ISI! )
I was getting a strange micro-stuttering when I (in the Nvidia control panel) changed Texture Filtering- Negative LOD Bias from Allow to Clamp. Clamp=micro-stutters, Allow=none. I don't know why, but I do know that it's reproduceable.
In SLI configuration, for me the solution has been to turn off enviromental reflections and turn on video sync in game. I still get some stuttering but it is much better. Setting no sync gives horrendous stutters.