kithylin wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

If any of you have a few copies of "hyper sli" which is a registry hack for older drivers you can get SLI working on a wider verity of boards with AMD and Intel chipsets. There is a hack for modern drivers but haven't tested it.

I've tried that before. It indeed does work, but it reduces performance of the cards as much as -30% depending on your CPU. Essentially it makes the CPU handle the SLI work on top of managing 2 cards and drags down most chips. Not to mention if you only have a quad core it'll pretty much "Slam" it at 90% CPU on all 4 cores every time a game's running too and overheat it to death.

I didn't have that issue but that was years ago back in 2011 or so with and AMD build, don't know how the modern hack performs but I had performance that would be expected of a SLI rig at the time. The old hack worked by fooling the drivers into thinking it was running on a X58 board and would enable without any fuss let alone any noticeable performance loss. The new hack looks much more involved than the old one, the old was just double click then once it was done reboot and you were free to run whatever you wanted.

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I had good experiences with just using something super modern, an AMD AM3+ board with 990FX chipset.

Because of the SLI licence, the older drivers you can use are:

New in Release 275.50

2011.06.20

Enables SLI technology on SLI-certified motherboards with AMD chipsets: 990FX, 990X, and 970.

But otherwise it's been smooth sailing. Sure these boards aren't cheap, but they are trouble free 😀

My small take on micro stuttering: it is very personal. Some don't ''see'' or ''feel'' it and some do. The higher the framerate, the lesser it is a problem for most.

Some years ago i opted for hd5770 crossfire over a single hd5870. A ''no brainer'' back then as (according to the reviews) the hd5770 CF setup was cheaper AND faster!

Well.... it was in benchmarks but in games it just didn't ''feel'' right to me. I play mostly racing games and for me it is a bit like this: 20fps is unplayable, 40 is playable, 60 is perfectly playable (depends a bit on the game).

So, the latest and greatest games that are very demanding can still be enjoyed at around 40fps. But with CrossFire i needed AT LEAST 60fps to make it ''feel'' smooth enough to make it feel like 40 fps.
When fps were high enough it was a usable setup. But i sold the cards and bought a single hd5870 and never looked back: much better, far more smoother with lesser fps AND the minimim fps were higher as well.

Bonus points to 3Dfx: my v2 sli setup does not stutter! 🤣

The 3dfx scanline interleave doesn't have the same problems of AFR. Unfortunately old SLI was also not compatible with more advanced rendering technology. I think SLI has some other quirks though. Vsync related? I don't remember. You can get artifacts.

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swaaye wrote:

The 3dfx scanline interleave doesn't have the same problems of AFR. Unfortunately old SLI was also not compatible with more advanced rendering technology. I think SLI has some other quirks though. Vsync related? I don't remember. You can get artifacts.

I know it is a different tech. But it is much older as well and it DOES work very well. I remember my CF setup not working because a game was too new and the driver wasn't ready, so i had to use a single card....the way the v2's work you don't have that problem either 😎

Drivers got way to complicated anyway, and with extremely BIG file sizes. 368mb for Nvidia's latest driver package for example is huge imho.

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