I have noticed some issues when in quad-sli with my 2 evga 690’s. I also noticed them during beta with quad SLI on 2 evga 590’s. With just one card in the issues seem to go away, but I dont want to remove the card jusr when its time to play GW2.
Framerate issues, and there are some screen images flickering in the character creation screen. Sometimes I only get 40 fps. I know GW2 is a little graphic intensive, but 2 690’s come on quad-sli. It should run any game out.
As far as any PC on earth is concerned it functions identical to quad SLI.
Even one 690GTX core is overkill for this game, the problem is that this game is ridiculously CPU intensive. Even areas that don’t necessarily have tons of players can be very CPU intensive so you will hit tons of bottlenecks. I have a i5-2500k @ 4.8GHZ myself and I experience frequent frame-rate drops on my 690GTX.
As far as any PC on earth is concerned it functions identical to quad SLI.
Even one 690GTX core is overkill for this game, the problem is that this game is ridiculously CPU intensive. Even areas that don’t necessarily have tons of players can be very CPU intensive so you will hit tons of bottlenecks. I have a i5-2500k @ 4.8GHZ myself and I experience frequent frame-rate drops on my 690GTX.
quad sli and 4 way sli are 2 completely diffrent things,if you would like to check call nvidia and speak with them. They will tell you. although to have someone tell you in detail what the diffrences are, you will have to talk to one of the better tech guys there.
also I have not seen much cpu usage while palying the game, not anything abnormal. could be a north bridge bottleneck issue but I doubt it, with the x79 motherboards.
There is a big diffrence in compatability, some motherboards are only 4way-sli capable while others are quad sli-certified when the asus rampage 5 extreme comes out you will see the specs will say quad-sli certified. unlike the rampage 4 extreme which is only 4 waylsli capable. My MB the sabertooth is quad certified. But if you do the research you will find out there is a diffrence.
not to mention the performance boost you get with one 690 over 2 680’s. just do the benchmarks or search for them. You will see the one 690 is 60% better than 2 680’s.
As far as any PC on earth is concerned it functions identical to quad SLI.
Even one 690GTX core is overkill for this game, the problem is that this game is ridiculously CPU intensive. Even areas that don’t necessarily have tons of players can be very CPU intensive so you will hit tons of bottlenecks. I have a i5-2500k @ 4.8GHZ myself and I experience frequent frame-rate drops on my 690GTX.
I have checked the cpu usage and it is only running about 13% usage while GW2 is running. I dont know why there are framerate issues in quad-sli but im sure soon we will see and update from nvidia where gw2 will have mote performance in sli systems. Also if you look at past updates there are notes on 4 way sli and quad sli. If they were theoretically the same, why would they have seperate related updates to the drivers?
It is really all the same. It’s 4 GPUs interconnected by a PCI-E bus. The GTX 690 have two GPUs each, connected by a PCI-E 3.0 bridge chip.
One 690 is usually around 95-100% of the performance of two 680s in SLI.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5805/nvidia-geforce-gtx-690-review-ultra-expensive-ultra-rare-ultra-fast/19
The GTX 690 doesn’t quite reach the performance of the GTX 680 SLI, but it’s very, very close. Based on our benchmarks we’re looking at 95% of the performance of the GTX 680 SLI at 5760×1200 and 96% of the performance at 2560×1600. These are measurable differences, but only just. For all practical purposes the GTX 690 is a single card GTX 680 SLI – a single card GTX 680 SLI that consumes noticeably less power under load and is at least marginally quieter too.
I have FPS problems with this game on 690 too it’s not worth wasting time on this game since even with good hardware you get crap performance. I have used EVGA precision to check GPU usage of 690 in SLI mode and it’s about 30 to 60% in areas like Lions Arch and FPS is at 40 to 20 on max settings and with reflections off and shadows off it’s at about 49 to 80 FPS with camera turning problems when you turn camera GPU usage drops to 1% or 5% and then goes back up which results in massive FPS fluctuation.
Also whenever there is fog the GPU usage falls under 40% and results in FPS below 50 and on single GPU the game runs even worse. Have tried countless profiles in Nvidia inspector it does not help i also tried unlocking all of the CPU cores, enabling/disabling HPET, overclocking CPU above 4.5Ghz and down clocking even just too see if it makes difference. I have even formated all of my drives and reinstalled Windows and installed only GW2 and still performance was crap so after spending countless hours trying to fix FPS problem i quit the game until ArenaNet give a statement on whenever it’s our problem that our hardware cant handle the game or whenever it’s their or Nvidia driver problem.
Bottlenecking for us is not the issue, nvidia has to update some drivers that will increase performance with GW2, like they do with every game. In a few months all the kinks should be worked out. There will be updates to GW2 im not even sure if the game supports sli right now which is why so many people with sli have the issue where the game runs the same in or out of sli. And with quad sli it is a new ball of wax, people are saying quad is the same as 4-way, but its not. although it may appear to be the same. If you have 4 cards, with 4 GPU’s. the motherboard will not see 2 cards with 4 gpu’s the same.
It is really all the same. It’s 4 GPUs interconnected by a PCI-E bus. The GTX 690 have two GPUs each, connected by a PCI-E 3.0 bridge chip.
One 690 is usually around 95-100% of the performance of two 680s in SLI.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5805/nvidia-geforce-gtx-690-review-ultra-expensive-ultra-rare-ultra-fast/19
The GTX 690 doesn’t quite reach the performance of the GTX 680 SLI, but it’s very, very close. Based on our benchmarks we’re looking at 95% of the performance of the GTX 680 SLI at 5760×1200 and 96% of the performance at 2560×1600. These are measurable differences, but only just. For all practical purposes the GTX 690 is a single card GTX 680 SLI – a single card GTX 680 SLI that consumes noticeably less power under load and is at least marginally quieter too.
All I know is that I spoke to nvidia directly regarding this and they told me, to properly run quad-sli, the motherboard has to be quad sli certified. I have seen posts that say if a motherboard is 4-way capable that quad will work, but if this is the case why do some boards state 4-way and quad sli in the description?
You can do Quad-SLI in two different configurations, each with different requirements:
Using 2 graphics cards, each with 2 GPUs (e.g., two GTX 690s). You only need a motherboard capable of delivering at least PCI-E (2.0 or 3.0) at >=8x speed on two PCI-E slots, because each graphics card already connects its GPUs by a PCI-E bus.
Using 4 graphics cards, each with 1 GPU (e.g., four GTX 680s). You need a motherboard with enough PCI-E lanes to support at least PCI-E (2.0 or 3.0) at >=8x speed on four PCI-E slots.
Since all GPUs share the same data, most Quad-SLI certified motherboards just use PCI-E bridge chips (like the PLX PEX 8747, for example) to compensate for fewer CPU PCI-E lanes.
the man spoke directly with nvidia … nuf said …doods ..
also .. the game is CPU bound and some people cant see it be cause they are looking at the OVERALL cpu usage that is a average load of ALL cores , and GW2 uses one core for something and another core for some thing else so in the end there will be 1 core at 100 % ( the bottlenecked one ) another 2 cores at 50 % ( doing some other less important part of the game ) and another core having 20% ( doing yet another unimportant part of them game ) all of these average at about 50% roughly .. you would think its not bottleneck .. but you have one core at 100% that is doing the hard part .. maybe physics or reflections ..
Exactly how i have it on a 3770K @ 4.7 Ghz ( one core is allways at close to 100% usage )
Something that hasn’t been said either is Quad-SLI is more for benchmarks and E-PEN than anything else. Most games arent optimized for 4 gpus as well as sometimes quad-sli can cause more problems than it solves.
Using task manager, and looking at all 8 cores, I don’t see 100% load on any CPU. Not saying that proves anything. Just saying what I see.
New unlocked i7 3770 should have arrived today at home. If so, will put it in after happy hour. Hope I don’t bend any pins and remember to properly hook the closed loop cooler up properly. You never know after tossing back a few.
I will try to do before and after benchmarks to find out if the game can be sped up with more agressive OC, or whether it’s just one of those hard to understand things (as to why fps is low in some areas.)
