Switched from HD6970 CF to GTX580 Sli, need info/help

Hi,

I'm completely new to Nvidia side, and in need of some tips / info / help with my SLI setup. This is kind of lengthy post, so bear with me

I built my rig a couple of months ago with MSI R6970 Lightnings in crossFire and fell in love with Lightning series. All went very well, I was very happy with the performance, and I kind of liked how AMD responded with drivers. I didn't get screen tearing and if I got, vsync fixed the issues. All games of course didn't support crossfire superbly, until AMD got profiles, or used RadeonPro to adjust.

Then I run Heaven DX 11 benchmark and my 2nd card showed nasty issues and I had to RMA it. I waited 1 month for replacement but the availability of those cards is close to zero. So I decided to get RMA as cash, sell my remaining card and jump on the green side. I wanted to stick with Lightning series, because they run cool and quiet, thus selling and upping to 580 gtx, instead of getting some other 6970. I also want to have identical cards

So, now I have 2 x N580Gtx Lightning in SLI setup and trying to learn how to optimize games for those babies. I've run into some trouble as how to get best performance(games with not best SLI support) out of these fellows as well as some rendering issues I didn't have with my 6970 CF setup.

Problems or things to improve knowledge of:

1) Vsycn
- Games(at least Crysis) will be capped to 24fps, if I set vsync on from games settings. Even in the menus where I can have 300+ fps, it
still caps the frame rate to 24. Am I doing something wrong here, or have I understood this wrong? On AMD side vsync worked wonders on every game, no issues.


2) Screen tearing, with Vsync on or off
- I get some nasty screen tearing on my setup with vsync or without it. Either I have not understood how to force vsync on games, or it doesn't work as it should.
- Civilization 5 / Witcher 2 will cap the frames to 60fps, but is still giving me tearing(nasty tearing bar in the middle of screen). I tried to take a screenshot, but the screenshot is fine. I can only see this on my monitor.


2.b) Render issues
- On crysis warhead I came up with this kind of rendering issue, that I never noticed with AMD CF setup. Edges of the trees are rendered white:

White edges

and when turning quickly those textures render black artifacts:

Blur + black artifacts

3) Performance
- I have actually no accurate idea what the frame rates should be with these cards, but I am in a belief that it should top the 6970 CF setup, at least in most games. Especially if those are the "NVIDIA: The Way It's Meant To Be Played?" ones
- Benchmark tests show better performance, Crysis 2 with DX11 & Ultra + hires textures is running smooth 60+, but I'd like to know how games like e.g. Witcher 2 slower than Crossfire setup, can be "fixed" :/

3D Mark 11, Basic Extreme settings:
X4170

Heaven Benchmark v2.5 Basic
FPS: 52.5
Scores: 1323
Min FPS: 24.2
Max FPS: 115.2

- direct3d11
- 1920x1080 8xAA full screen
- Shaders: high
- Textures: high
- Filter: trilinear
- Anisotropy: 16x
- Occlusion: enabled
- Refraction: enabled
- Volumetric: enabled
- Tessellation: extreme


4) Drivers
- on AMD side I always installed over the old drivers without sweeping the old ones. As I noticed this was more bullet proof and AMD suggested doing this. How is it with Nvidia, as I did install the initial drivers(275.33) and then over wrote those with 280.26 drivers. So far no problems


5) Tools
- I used RadeonPro tool to modify vsync, triple buffer, frame render methods(alternative rendering), etc. to suite the different games. As I have understood right, nvidia inspector is the same for Nvidia cards.
- Does it have to be on all the time, or are those Nvidia profiles just written on HD once I set them in inspector? This is how I've rolled so far. I've just have had trouble with vsync, which leads me to believe I'm doing something wrong here


6) Proper settings
- Should physics X be handled by the 2nd card (auto-select)? Why have I seen screenshots of physics X processor set to CPU in SLI?
- Should I "let the 3D application decide" or select the "use the advanced 3D image settings"? Doesn't applications still decide if I have selected that in advanced 3D image settings and I believe these are the profiles the Inspector will modify, right?


7) HDMI output to TV, in clone mode
- Should this be disabled while gaming? TV is not always on HDMI-output, but the the HDMI connection goes through HDMI-switch, which is on always. So Windows does recognize HDMI as second connection on 1st card 24/7.

----
System specs:
Intel i7 2600K @4.2
Sli, N580Gtx Lightning @stock (@x16 & @x8, I know... for temps)
Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7-B3
Vengeance 8GB DDR3-1600 @8-8-8-24
Corsair AX 1200W
Samsung SyncMaster XL2370 @1080p, connected from 1st card(DVI)

Samsung un46b8500 TV, @1080p, connected from 1st card(HDMI), in clone mode

Driver version:
280.26 WHQL
---

 

The Graphical Issues that I see on the Screenshots there are probably too high Overclocking. Probably no good Selection on the part of MSI.
Downclock the Cards a little and see whether the Errors still exist.

 

I had those black squares before from poor ram, after testing your clocks maybe try testing your ram.

 

Ok, I could try that.

It's just funny as that is the only tree in crysis warhead, well there is 1 other tree acting like that. It's not like constant problem, only 2 trees acting like that

 

You mean video card ram? How do I actually test video card ram?

I've run benchmarks, fur test, etc.

 

I have no problems with my sli.But I did had a lot with amd 5970.Lame drivers and vsync was not always helping, for ex. black screen in BF BC2 and screen split in two parts but not synced.
Try Metro 2033, see how that performs.I can also see something sometimes in Metro but it's caused by vsync thing.
Also try to go through the older drivers.When I first got my nvidia card I went from Gigabyte 580 to 590 and than to 580 lightning and I was still having artifacts and the display driver stopped by windows. And I was using the latest driver =)). So I went to an older driver and my problems disappeared.I've used that driver for a couple of months before I tried something new.Now I'm using 280.26
You should probably do a clean install of the drivers, use driver sweeper from safe mode to remove the current driver before installing a different one.

 

Reg Witcher 2... make sure it's patched, the sli will perform much better.Disable Ubersampling and u will have 60fps constantly, well at least I have it on 1 monitor@1080, don't know about 2 monitors.

 

Metro 2033 runs very well. Better than on 6970 CF. I get around ~65 fps constant, with everything maxed out. No artifacts or problems there. All Crysis games run very well, and only problem as on screenshots is the one single tree texture render issue, in Crysis Warhead.

My only "real" issues is screen tearing on many games, and not able to set vsync on properly. Once I figure that out, I'm very satisfied with this setup

 

Since the latest patch & newer drivers I now get about 50fps everything max with ubersampling ON at 1920x1200. Scales incredibly well now - just took a while to get there.

OP - as Circus said, make sure the game is up to date, this should really help the scaling. Also, dont enable aniso or AA in the nvidia CP as I was fiddling around with this and it killed the FPS massively.

 

Thanks for your tips.

I fiddled with all settings and finally figured that it was my TV, which was connected through HDMI, that limited the Vsync to 24FPS. I don't know why it's different, but my monitor works properly and Vsync + triple buffer will not drop to 24. But as soon as my TV is connected the limit hits to 24FPS, event hough it should support 60Hz as native.

When I disable TV, and only use desktop on my monitor vsync functions properly. No more screen tearing WHUUHUU! And I get constant 60fps on every game I run

Now only thing to figure out is how to get that vsync work with TV also

 

You can try DLing a program called rivatuner, within that bundle/or install there is another program called D3Doverrider and using that tool you can hard force vsynch and tripplebuffering on games/programs that refuse.

 

Actually D3Doverrider is the program I have now tested for couple of days, and after figuring out that TV was the cause for vsync problem, I've noticed that D3Doverriders vsync + triplebuffer give a very smooth performance.

I'm not sure if it's possible but it kind of seems that D3DOs vsync + triplebuffer is even smoother than using games vsync + nvidia drivers triplebuffer settings.

I'm really starting to like the greenside

 

The Crysis tree "artifacts" are not caused by your card. It's a bug with the game itself. It happens to TONS of people ,especially those with 6900 series AMD cards.

 

D3Doverrider would be better downloaded as a stand alone just goggle tthe term
" D3Doverrider standalone" in crysis the 24 fps cap is a bug hit alt enter twice and it should fix it if it does not turn vsync off then hit alt enter turn back on then hit alt enter it is stupid but it will be fixed.

 

Plug your monitor using DVI cable, not HDMI.

 

It happened to me with old 8800GT, its a game bug.

 

Just remembered something about Crysis Warhead, my game got corrupted once and all the bullets and grenades turned into chickens and I'm not making this up, need to find those screnshots, hope I still got them...

 

^ Thats one of the features of the cracked version that

 

yeap, the funniest ever cause nobody could die from chickens.The chicken grenade was awesome

 

You have 2 options to get rid off the 24 cap on your tv for all crysis games 1st for Crysis2 all you have to do while in game is pause the game go to graphic options and disable and then re enable vsync and your tv will switch to 60hz no need to hit alt enter or anything else.As for Crysis and Crysis warhead you have to create a custom resolution in the Nvidia control panel of 1919 x 1080 and select that for your resolution within the game that gets rid of the 24hz bug in DX10 in those two games.And one more thing D3Doverrider is for DX9 titles only and works great for triple buffering,Nvidia's control panel triple buffering is only for open gl titles only not for Direct X.And nvidia inspector is a great utility for applying different types of AA for your games and for some that do not support it officially,checkout the AA thread for profiles.