Are there any advantages utilizing two graphic cards in one PC ?Thanks

Are there any advantages utilizing two graphic cards in one PC ?Thanks

Yes.... :biggrin:On a serious note, it depends what you want to do. For FSX, not so much.

Yes.... :biggrin:On a serious note, it depends what you want to do. For FSX, not so much.

Only for FSX.

Unfortunately, Crossifre or SLI aren't supported by FSX (a shame really) soyou won't get any extra performance from using a multi graphics card configuration. It does work for most CPU games though.

Unfortunately, Crossifre or SLI aren't supported by FSX (a shame really) soyou won't get any extra performance from using a multi graphics card configuration. It does work for most CPU games though.

Thanks for you reply

Just to add but not take away what others have said. It is 100% correct that Xfire and SLI are not supported with FSX, but if you are running in very high resolutions across several monitors at once, it will make quite a bit of difference. You won't see it if your running one monitor at it's max res, but if you had something like the Matrox Triplehead2Go you would running it at max resolution. My resolution is 5040x1050 and it runs fine in that resolution. SLI is primarily for high resolutions anyway, and you never will see much improvement in any game if the resolution is low to medium.

Dan is right!The higher resolution you fly with, the more benefit you'll have by using SLI or Crossfire, and of course the more Anti Aliasing and so on.That's one case where you'd want to video cards. The other one is usepools=0 . The more powerful your video card is, the more stable that tweak will run your FSX. With usepools=0 you very much DO use your video cards, no longer just the CPU.Now if you combine those two, high resolution/big screen and usepools=0, then SLI or Crossfire is what you want.Regards,Markus

Only for FSX.

I had two...completely useless!!!I sold one.David Di Domizio

I had two...completely useless!!!I sold one.

And what resolution were you flying at? Did you use high AA settings? And did you use usepools=0? Please be a bit more specific before you say that it's completely useless...Markus

Plus just because you had two video cards doesn't mean anything. Were you running in SLI or Cross? I would say most people that have an SLI setup have no clue to where to look for the benefits.

I want to clear up a misconception I see a lot in the FS community regarding multi-GPU schemes like SLI and Crossfire:SLI or Crossfire isn't something games have to "support" explicitly through a menu option or something like that. What actually determines how much benefit you see from it is how much the game's graphics engine relies on the GPU. The reason FSX doesn't see much benefit from multi-GPU is because it's a CPU limited engine. Contrast that with a game like Crysis, which is almost entirely GPU limited - it benefits like crazy from multi-GPU.

Isn't flight simulator more Dependent on CPU, not GPU? Naresh

Correct me if I'm wrong but when I said "not supported" I meant that the coding of FSX wasn'tmade with SLI or Crossfire in mind (same for multicore processors initialy ?). With my HD4870 crossfire setup, while running FSX, when I go into the catalyst control center to check the workload of the two graphics card I see that only one of them is working (0% for the other one).I didn't know about the usepools trick so I'll give it a try though !PS : I'm running a single 24' LCD and use high AA although it seems like FSX's AAhas the priority over ATI's AA...

Correct me if I'm wrong but when I said "not supported" I meant that the coding of FSX wasn'tmade with SLI or Crossfire in mind (same for multicore processors initialy ?).

Only so far as the game is hugely CPU limited - most games don't have any sort of dedicated SLI mode, it's just that they utilize the GPU a lot more and the driver knows how to split that across two GPUs. SLI isn't like multithreading (which is what multicore CPU use is) - the two GPUs actually combine to draw different parts of the 3D scene independently, that's where the boost comes from, each card is doing half the work.

With my HD4870 crossfire setup, while running FSX, when I go into the catalyst control center to check the workload of the two graphics card I see that only one of them is working (0% for the other one).

That's actually probably ATI's doing - Nvidia and ATI create SLI or Crossfire profiles for games that tells the driver how to split the load between them - they probably just never bothered to make an FSX profile because the GPU utilization is so low to begin with.

To reiterate Markus' question...Has anyone seen benefit in FSX running SLI/Crossfire with usepools=0 (or bufferpools=0)?