SLI & MOP - Nvidia Inspector Question

[Stilllogicz]

Hey guys, do you know if SLI is working properly for MOP? I have 2 GTX 560 ti's and I noticed my FPS gets all kind of crazy when I have SLI turned on. I was wondering if anyone has good Nvidia Inspector settings for this expansion they'd be willing to share.

Thanks in advance!

[edit]: My cpu is an i52500k OC'd to 4.6 Ghz.

[Darsithis]

Moved to Computer

[Stilllogicz]

Thanks Darsithis, my bad for posting in the wrong forum!

[Cyanotical]

are you running the latest drivers? (306.97)

[Stilllogicz]

Yes I am Cyanotical.

[Cyanotical]

SLI should be running fine, what you may want check is that you are running the 64Bit client, and you are in directx 11 mode

[Wries]

Working splendidly for me with Windows 7, 64 bit client and DX 11 mode, only setting I've set in the WoW game profile is "high performance" rather than "power saving" or whatever it's called. No nvidia inspector tinkering.

[Stilllogicz]

Here's a better question, what settings can I change to lower my vram usage? My card is going to it's limits (1gb) in 25 man raids and this leads to serious fps drops and all kinds of weird things.

[Yimmeryams]

EDIT: TL;DR, turn down Multisampling and Shadow Quality.

Turn down or turn off Multisampling.

Turn down your Texture Resolution setting.

Turn off Vertical Sync and / or Triple Buffering.

Turn down your View Distance and Environmental Detail. Turning down the Ground Clutter probably will not lower much VRAM usage, if at all, but it will help general performance.

Make sure you set these settings in-game, and ensure that in the Nvidia Control Panel Anti Aliasing and Vertical Sync are set to Application Controlled for "World of Warcraft".

You may also want to turn down Pre-rendered Frames in the Nvidia Control Panel, from 3 to 1. You may or may not get a FPS drop. You may see a VRAM usage decrease. You may see an input lag decrease.

The best thing to do is evaluate which options mean the most to you, and lower them accordingly. You shouldn't have to lower all of them. You might also have some addons that increase your VRAM usage somehow. Experimenting will be the best, I think.

EDIT: I did some experimenting. Set my settings to Ultra, Multisampling to 8x, Vertical Sync Enabled, Triple Buffering Enabled, 1920x1080 resolution, Pre-rendered frames to 4. Halfhill used around 880MB, Alli Shrine (low population) around 1000MB, Horde Shrine (higher pop, but still not near 25) around 1000MB. So if you have your settings really high, you can definitely hit the VRAM limits.

From 1000MB I was getting in Alliance Shrine, setting Multisampling from 8x to 1x dropped my VRAM down to 492MB, which is huge.

Dropping Shadow Quality from Ultra to Low lowered VRAM usage by around 100MB for me, so that's another good place to lower it.

Lowering View Distance from Ultra to Low also lowered my VRAM, but it varied depending on the area and what I was looking at. However, View Distance is one of those things that changes gameplay, so I'd recommend lowering other settings first and leaving View Distance for the end.

I can't test Vertical Sync, Triple Buffering, or Pre-rendered Frames well. My guess would be, you'd lower VRAM by 20-150 MB by lowering these settings.

I surprisingly didn't see a big difference with changing the Texture Resolution, which seems really odd, so experiment with it yourself. Changing the setting doesn't reload the UI, so it probably had the old textures still loaded or something. This could also have a huge effect with a bunch of players on the screen, which I was not able to test with.

Liquid Detail, SSAO, and Sunshafts also had very little VRAM usage for me, but if you're looking to drop another 20 or so, you might try disabling or lowering those as well. These settings may vary greatly depending on the area and what you're looking at, so it may be a much bigger difference than I saw.

[Cyanotical]

Turn down or turn off Multisampling.

Turn down your Texture Resolution setting.

Turn off Vertical Sync and / or Triple Buffering.

Turn down your View Distance and Environmental Detail. Turning down the Ground Clutter probably will not lower much VRAM usage, if at all, but it will help general performance.

Make sure you set these settings in-game, and ensure that in the Nvidia Control Panel Anti Aliasing and Vertical Sync are set to Application Controlled for "World of Warcraft".

You may also want to turn down Pre-rendered Frames in the Nvidia Control Panel, from 3 to 1. You may or may not get a FPS drop. You may see a VRAM usage decrease. You may see an input lag decrease.

The best thing to do is evaluate which options mean the most to you, and lower them accordingly. You shouldn't have to lower all of them. You might also have some addons that increase your VRAM usage somehow. Experimenting will be the best, I think.

with those cards he can run everything on ultra, -1 for shadows and 2-4x multisampling

Vsync should only ever be turned off for benchmarking, otherwise you dont need the extra heat and power draw


SLI issues are almost never related to rendering difficulty, they are driver or hardware related

either the drivers are buged, and are not registering the correct version of wow, (wow-64.exe vs wow.exe)
or the driver profiles have not been updated for the game and are switching to a default AFR profile, which many games have trouble with

on teh hardware side, the two GPU may not be using the same clock speed, a power cable might be loose, or the SLI bridge is not making good contact


pretty much none of what you said is relevant

[Yimmeryams]

Here's a better question, what settings can I change to lower my vram usage? My card is going to it's limits (1gb) in 25 man raids and this leads to serious fps drops and all kinds of weird things.

I was answering this question, where he asked specifically how to reduce VRAM usage.

He was also talking about hitting his limits in 25 man raids, which are more graphically demanding on normal. He probably cannot run everything on Ultra comfortably in 25 man raids.

@Stilllogicz: If you want to try fixing the cause of the problem, try the hardware things Cyanotical suggested (check the power cables and SLI bridge).

On the software end, I recommend doing a full uninstall and clean of your Nvidia drivers. It might take around half an hour to make sure you get everything from Nvidia uninstalled and cleaned, and to make sure that your GPUs are running with the generic drivers from Microsoft.

Once that's done, and there is no trace of anything Nvidia left on your system, install the latest drivers. I like using the betas personally, but sticking to the latest release is fine.

Doing a clean install can fix a lot of weird errors that occur but shouldn't be occurring, including messed up SLI settings, game profile settings, and possibly even clock speed problems.

I'll look for a link to the Nvidia forums with a guide on the process, and I'll edit it in.

EDIT1: Addressing Vertical Sync preventing extra heat and power draw:

If Vertical Sync is disabled, and you don't notice or care about the screen tearing, leave it off and use a FPS limiter.

There's one in-game you can use, or you can get an external program such as EVGA Precision X or MSI Afterburner. The in-game one is easier to use and doesn't require downloading anything, so I recommend starting with that.

Limiting your FPS to your monitor's refresh rate (probably 60 Hz, in which case the limiter should be set to 60 FPS) will prevent the GPU from wasting time rendering frames you'll never see, similar to the side effect of Vertical Sync.

If you do see screen tearing, then by all means enable Vertical Sync, and I would recommend using Triple Buffering as well to make the Framerate smoother.

EDIT2: Afterthought

What's the wattage on your power supply?

[Cyanotical]

I was answering this question, where he asked specifically how to reduce VRAM usage.

He was also talking about hitting his limits in 25 man raids, which are more graphically demanding on normal. He probably cannot run everything on Ultra comfortably in 25 man raids.

the major limiting factor right now in 25 man raids is the CPU sifting through all the combat data and performing the CPU based rendering like shadows, wow only has 2 main threads to do this, so until blizzard revamps the engine, or splits off the CPU rendering to a third main thread, this will be an issue for everyone, this is why it suggested to run ultra, -1 for shadows

atm the only way we have of bypassing this is to use a cpu with more powerful cores, this is why AMD is simply not recommended any more even though an fx-8350 is fine for other games like COD and LoL, this is also why a 3960x is no better for wow than a 2500k

i understand the reasons for using a FPS limiter instead of vsync, vsync causes input lag, but so far i have not been too impressed with the fps limiters and even the target framerate or adaptive vsync, in a few years they may be good, but for now they dont work too well, and when it comes to wow, input lag is not something you need to worry about anyway because of global cool downs and server lag, in fact it really only shows when moving the camera

[Yimmeryams]

Here's the link I was talking about: https://forums.geforce.com/default/t...led-properly-/

Some of the links in that post are outdated, such as where to download the latest Nvidia drivers, but it's pretty easy to download those, so it shouldn't be a problem. I'd recommend staying with the release, as many people are having problems with the current betas.

@Cyanotical
The reason I suggested using an FPS limiter instead of VSync was so there would be less VRAM usage, as that's what he most recently asked for help and information with.

The FPS limiter built into WoW works just fine for me, and probably will work for Stilllogicz as well. What problems have you been having with them?

I think input lag does matter, even with the global cooldown and server lag. There are many spells off the global cooldown, and if I remember correctly, the GCD is handled client-side and mostly unaffected by server lag. Having any sort of noticeable input lag is, for me and probably other people, distracting and detrimental to gameplay and performance.

That being said, VSync in most cases will not provide noticeable input lag and can most likely be used with any detrimental side effects. I brought it up because using it CAN increase VRAM usage, which Stilllogicz wants to reduce.

EDIT: @Stilllogicz
Once your VRAM problem is fixed, the small increase in VRAM usage from Vertical Sync / Triple Buffering and Pre-rendered Frames will probably not be an issue. They might not even be an issue for you now, and it might just be the big ones like Shadows and Multisampling pushing it over.

[Cyanotical]

the 560ti comes standard with a gig of vram, which is more than enough for wow at 1080 or less, even mine running at 1440 only uses about 1.4 gigs with everything beyond ultra

i was talking more about the adaptive vsync, and target framerate, so far i've had no success in using them, but that's mainly a game compatibility issue

as to performance, do some dps testing, you wont suffer any noticeable loss with vsync on, issues like that are more to do with the player and not the technology

[Yimmeryams]

as to performance, do some dps testing, you wont suffer any noticeable loss with vsync on, issues like that are more to do with the player and not the technology

I never said that. I even specifically stated that VSync is unlikely to cause any noticeable input lag. I disagree with your broad statement on input lag.

Onto the VRAM. Yeah, 1GB of VRAM is plenty, when working correctly. His computer clearly isn't working as intended, so lowering VRAM as a workaround is still very relevant.