City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

SLI Win 7 64bit

Hyperstrike

By Hyperstrike,
Posted on: 2010-05-01 11:47 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs

 

Posted

I've not kept up with this forum in a bit so sorry if I'm going over old ground - but I remember that city of heros "doesn't work with SLI" and the latest profile even has it set to single GPU... but... if your up for editing your nvapps.xml then:

Code: 
<PROFILE Label="City of Heroes">
   <APPLICATION Label="CityOfHeroes.exe"/>
   <PROPERTY Label="multichip_rendering_mode" Value="0x00000005" Default="0x00000004"/>
   <PROPERTY Label="multichip_ogl_options" Value="0x05800000" Default="0x0000FFFF"/>
  </PROFILE>
seems to work for me fine on win 7 64bit with a GTX260 SLI setup, with a minimum fps boost of ~15% and average increase of 60% with none of the flickering, slowdown/input lag or other problems. These settings so far appear to be the most optimal with the best blend of performance and compatibility but there may be other better settings. This is on the 197.45 drivers.

EDIT: With a bit more testing it seems that these settings cause flicker on the windows of the moving vehicle models and agent avatars in the contacts window, not major problems tho.

 

Posted

There is also a totally unsupported command that you can put at the end of the shortcut to CoH to enable SLI.

If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.

Black Pebble is my new hero.

 

Posted

Did a bit of testing with this during beta.

Now you CAN force AFR in the drivers.

Realistically, and yes, you get a performance bump from it.

Most of the activity is STILL confined to the primary video card. The SLI link gets very very little activity traveling across it.

In short, it DOES utilize SLI, but it doesn't do it very well.


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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Texas Justice View Post
There is also a totally unsupported command that you can put at the end of the shortcut to CoH to enable SLI.
I tried -slifbos 2 - it made no difference, I can't see how it would unless it fools the drivers into thinking its another game as COH is hard set to single GPU rendering in the nVidia profile.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike View Post
Did a bit of testing with this during beta.

Now you CAN force AFR in the drivers.

Realistically, and yes, you get a performance bump from it.

Most of the activity is STILL confined to the primary video card. The SLI link gets very very little activity traveling across it.

In short, it DOES utilize SLI, but it doesn't do it very well.
Using ultra quality settings (everything maxed except ambient occlusion which is on medium bilateral) I get a pretty decent boost from the 2nd card, in (solo) indoor missions I go from ~108 to 199fps. In outdoor scenes with low to medium amounts to render I get from ~68 to ~110fps. Unfortunatly tho in the places where you could really do with all the scaling you could get i.e. 8 player team doing TF or long view distance over the city the increase isn't as impressive, typically ~38 to 45fps tho it all helps.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rroff View Post
Using ultra quality settings (everything maxed except ambient occlusion which is on medium bilateral) I get a pretty decent boost from the 2nd card, in (solo) indoor missions I go from ~108 to 199fps. In outdoor scenes with low to medium amounts to render I get from ~68 to ~110fps. Unfortunatly tho in the places where you could really do with all the scaling you could get i.e. 8 player team doing TF or long view distance over the city the increase isn't as impressive, typically ~38 to 45fps tho it all helps.

What resolution are you running at? That does make a difference.

The testing I was doing was at ultra-high resolutions (25x20).


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Posted

I've tested on 1680x1050 and 2048x1152 and seen similiar scaling.

It seems a bit varied tho - most of my initial testing was around atlas and steel canyon, jumped in fault line yesterday and minimum gains were barely 10% and average closer to 30%. Also found flicker on the contact avatars and on certain objects so will have to tweak some more tho they aren't major issues.

Hopefully nvidia will release support in newer drivers tho as the gains then would potentially be much better.


EDIT: From a little more testing it seems that -slifbos 2 in conjuction with forcing SLI increases the rendering performance of 2D elements but reduces performance of purely 3D rendering so its a bit of a mixed benefit. Aslong as the first 4 SLI flags are disabled SLI will give a performance gain and the main flickering goes away - all the other flags seem pretty much as good as each other with certain combinations giving better performance in some areas of the game and others in other areas, some of the extra flags can also give fullscreen flickering. So far no combination of flags can remove the flickering on contact avatars and vehicle windows - looks like something only the developer or nVidia can fix.