Railworks America

With all the excitement over the current updates nearly over has anyone heard any more about a further update to utilize SLI setups more effectively?

I am aware and already have TS2012 utilizing SLI through mode 2 in the Nvidia Control Panel, but the workload on both cards never seems to exceed 60% which seems a wasted lot of power TS2012 could be using. At the same time the workload on my i5-2500K 4.5Ghz is well below I expected.

I also realize that TS2012 is not exactly SLI friendly, but better use of PhysX, CUDA, etc. would be nice.

Regards

Take that as a no.

Maybe give it a little more than 4 1/2 hours.

Hawk wrote:Maybe give it a little more than 4 1/2 hours.

MugHug wrote:Take that as a no.

No offense meant, but I would rather them get the core right than spin around with SLI. For now you can force it in the Nvidia controls.

@ arizonachris

None taken. :)

If you read my post, I already stated that I had enabled it using mode 2 in the Nvidia Control Panel.

No.. This should be 100 million billion percent PRIORITY. Because if it has PROPER SLI and Crossfire support, it would mean it would also actually be using the graphics card properly in the first place and not use a lousey single CPU core to do all the heavy lifting and benefit even single GPU customers. Something it simply isn't doing now.

Let's roll that beautiful bean footage..

Oh look at my pretty Deferred Shading TrainSim! Choo Choo! All aboard the 0% GPU usage (peep the overlay) and 8.1 FPS train.. Next stop unplayableville!!

Click


And just to counter the "maybe your overlay isn't working right" deflection I've got before. .

Oh look at my pretty Deferred Shading Metro 2033 game running in (to prove a point) Directx9 mode with 87%/86% GPU Usage and over 100FPS with Physx and Advanced Physx enabled with MSAA 4X at the absolute highest settings.

Click

styckx,



About the lack of GPU use, I'm wondering of there's some kind of silent failure going on. I remember reading that DirectX has a software fallback mode, it does have a name but I can't recall it. Microsoft introduced it in DirectX and Windows Presentation Foundation. WPF is hardware accelerated via DirectX (9 I think) and is used in Windows user interfaces for some apps.

The idea is that there's a lot of differently performing graphics cards and they don't have the same features, this causes a headache for the programmer because they have to check what the card can and can't do and then branch their code accordingly. The more cards to support, the more complex things get in your code. So to help the problem, MS introduced a fallback so that if the programmer asked the card to do something it couldn't do, it reverted to doing it in software instead. The result is that the program still runs, just a lot slower. Much better then just crashing.

So, as a speculative hypothesis, how about RW3 is asking the card to do something it can't or supplying something in the wrong format? This results in the card rejecting it, DirectX detects the problem and does it's fallback. Wham! Unplayableville as you say :)

Of course it is just speculation and I've never even seen a fallback, let alone created one. (sorry)
But it's clear that a scene is being rendered, there's polygons and textures and lights and stuff, so there should be some GPU activity.

Best regards,

Shadders.

Sounds fine, but what works against it in a way is that, we can turn SLI on in both modes via the Nvidia Control Panel.

Monitored the SLI setup performance via EVGA Precision many times over this issue. You can get approx. 55% workload on each card and temps go up accordingly.

Trouble is that is seems to offer around the same level of performance in TS2012 as just using one of my cards.

Not really understanding how exactly TS2012 communicates with DirectX, and how DirectX communicates with my video card drivers, plus how RS have put their own twist on it, I can only make assumptions based on what I see and hear.

There are other games that will not use the SLI even if I force it in the NCP. There are others that will crash or have major graphic issues. Even the new game, RAGE now causes a real bad crash if you force SLI.

It would seem that there is some kind of amicable communication between TS2012 and my video card drivers to get as far as splitting the workload across the cards and TS2012 runs nicely. Maybe the drivers are doing it all and just accepting input from TS2012 and then splitting the frames or whatever to each card.

It is just annoying that I have one powerful video card sitting there doing nothing while TS2012 struggles if I turn the settings up real high.

I only recently upgraded to SLI, going from a HD 6870 to two GTX 460s. I did not regret the move and it seemed all my games FSX, ArmA 2, Ship Simulator Extreme, Crysis games, racing sims, MMOs, FPSs, RPGs and on and on, benefited from my SLI in one way or another.

TS2012 seems like Cinderella that cannot go to the ball with her sisters because of RS!!

In this day and age, that can be hard to swallow. It is the only time I regret going SLI instead of getting a GTX580 or similar.