Agreed posted:

You can expect what makes you happy, but it's still going to be kinda lovely compared to the next big thing (which is awesome, progress rocks, but still). A wiser purchase than a 980 would be two 970s - either way you're getting not-totally-ideal performance, but at least with SLI it's mainly to due with how compatible the game is as opposed to "sorry, one card won't play this poo poo very well "

We know gently caress and all about long-term anything right now. We're kind of edging up on a bunch of serious poo poo in computing hardware development and production, positive and negative. Still, there's no damned way the ecosystem is changing THAT much in 2-3 years. But we'll just have to wait and see if nV did a really good job with their implementation of DX12 this hardware generation, since as of current it's a pleasant thing to think about that likely won't be realized until the useful life of the card is over. Same can't be said for many of the features they're offering, but that's a major one that I think is being used a little bit carelessly (well, to be more accurate, it's marketing fluff right now - maybe it'll be great later, but dev cycle being what it is, that'll likely be a job for GTX *whatever).

Generally speaking, if you're weighing single 980 vs. two 970s, you're only better off getting the 980 if you genuinely need ~10-15% more performance than 970s provide and refuse to use SLI. It makes more sense for a very small subset of folks who are running a dual-card SLI setup but not willing to try 3 or something like that, feeding a lot of pixels across multiple monitors where performance scaling starts to really eat poo poo.

That's major edge-case territory, reserved for people who are exceeding 1600p by a lot one way or another. Two 970s is actually, finally adequate for current-gen 4K gaming if that is your kick, but if you go any higher than that and don't want to deal with microstuttering and poor performance scaling with 3+ cards, you might actually benefit from going with two 980s over two 970s.

One 980 is just not a great purchase. Whole lot of money for that extra ~10-15% performance.

Factory Factory posted:

No joke, I can think of a number of times when I've thought games would be cool with interactive grass like that. But it is also a little bit silly for a multibillion dollar corporation to be doing intensive real-time simulation of astroturf.

Star War Sex Parrot posted:

Yep this is the answer.

The Iron Rose posted:

Not sure if I'm missing something or not, but did you turn SLI on in the Nvidia control panel?

BurritoJustice posted:

Use GPU-Z while loading both cards to make sure that they are both running at PCIE3 x8, not PCIE3 x16/PCIE2 x4 like some boards set. Sounds like a motherboard issue to me.

BurritoJustice posted:

Mod trolling. Anything over a GTX750 is hideous overkill for dedicated PhysX. And all that dedicated PhysX allows is to really turn up the PhysX effects in games that have them without a drop in performance, compared to the 80-100% performance increase that SLI allows in games that support it (most anything where SLI would be a benefit).

BIG HEADLINE posted:

I was worried about the same thing with my 970. GPU-Z was showing my card in 1.1 reduced-speed mode...when I was in GPU-Z. When I alt-tabbed into something demanding, then tabbed back into GPU-Z, it was running at PCIe 2.0 x16. That's also when I learned that even though I've got a PCIe 3.0-capable Z68 motherboard, you only get PCIe 3.0 speeds with an Ivy Bridge chip installed. Oh well.

And yeah, slicking the drivers completely with DDU is a good idea - I made the mistake of dropping my first 970 in after taking out my SLIed 560/448s, thinking the drivers would just recognize the new card over the old, and found Windows was still registering the existence of the 560s in addition to the 970, at least at the driver level.

BIG HEADLINE posted:

Possibly a dumb question, but you do have them bridged, right? And if so, you might have a bad bridge. They're not exactly the strongest pieces in the SLI puzzle.

You also have to manually enable SLI in the driver control panel.

SlayVus posted:

Well, you shouldn't be plugging and unplugging the SLI cable while the computer is on first of all. General rule of thumb is to turn if the computer before you start unplugging things. Unless it has hot swap capabilities, which video cards do not.

veedubfreak posted:

Have you updated the bios on the board?

I have a Maximus VII Formula and am running SLI 980s with no issues.

Also, try switching the cards.

This board right? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132125&cm_re=maximus_hero-_-13-132-125-_-Product

If so you should have 1 slot free between the 2 cards.

KakerMix posted:

SLI is a total crap shoot and is why after doing 2 780tis for a year I went back to a single GPU. The minor quirks and headaches associated with SLI just weren't worth putting up with really only one (1) game I play supported it. You being sad about only 10% of the games you play supporting SLI is what I went through, now pile on 90% of those other games potentially running *worse* with SLI on and you start to get to where I was with SLI. Just not worth it for how I game. So to answer your question, no, 2 970s in SLI are not better than the new Titan. Single GPU vs. 2 GPUs and all the compromises that come with SLI.

I'm pretty happy with my Titan X by the way, it's true power shined tonight when I played one of my favorite games, Planetside 2. For those of you that don't know, Planetside 2 is notoriously hard on game hardware, getting a solid 60 FPS is difficult most days, but not today. A rock solid 60 FPS @ 3440x1440 all options turned up and shadows on ultra. Once more, I can get mostly 60 and dips into the 50s when I run it at 1.22 render quality in the .ini file (an in-game version of DSR or super sampling that doesn't gently caress with the UI, 1.22 = 1.5x the pixels).

Subjunctive posted:

Basically nothing using UE4 does SLI, because AFR doesn't work well with the UE4 rendering pipeline last I checked.

App13 posted:

So I just installed this 1080ti and now I have a 970 just sitting around... Any use in dedicating it to physx if all I do is VR?

AVeryLargeRadish posted:

No, not at all.

EdEddnEddy posted:

Jesus that is a drop. Makes all the little mountains look like nothing once that cliff happened.

Now considering how good their GPU's have been for Apple all this time, why the heck would they have dropped them like this just now? Literally to open them up to purchase or is it just Apple being proprietary dicks and probably stealing all they know from them anyway?

Jago posted:

There's a bunch of obvious ways to do this, but the best advice I can give you is to NOT use a second video card for physix. Sell it for a buck fifty.

CaptainSarcastic posted:

Yeah, an adapter might be the best option short of replacing the PSU.

CaptainSarcastic posted:

Also, you clearly need more LEDs in that case. The inside of a computer should like a Shadowrun city block.

Col.Kiwi posted:

Yup. Coolermaster says that power supply can offer SIX PCIe 6+2pin connectors. So as long as he can find the extra cables that came with the PSU he has more than enough http://www.coolermaster.com/powersupply/silent-pro-m2/silent-pro-m2-850w/

Paul MaudDib posted:

Yeah, SLI/CF profiles are usually terrible for a month or two. Fallout 4 had huge problems as well, apart from Battlefield or something that's the case with virtually any game you care to name, even big AAA titles. Half the time the regular drivers aren't even very good let alone SLI/CF.

In general my advice is to forget about launch-day hooplah and just wait a month to let the launch-day bugs and SLI profiles shake themselves out. Plus you can wait for reviews and poo poo so you don't buy yet another half-polished turd. You can usually pick up a decent discount on a grey-market game key too.

PerrineClostermann posted:

Paul MaudDib posted:

EVGA and Zotac both shipped models of 970 that were incompatible with other brands (sometimes incompatible within the same brand). There have been a few other times as well, I want to say back in the 700 generation and maybe one funky model of the 980 Ti too?

I remember reading that at times there's been both mechanical (someone put the SLI fingers in the wrong spot) and electrical incompatibles (someone didn't implement the spec right) but I can't source that.


If this is two FE cards, I would assume you're safe, they're a reference implementation. I don't think I've heard of any SLI issues with the 10-series period let alone with ref cards.

At half price, are you sure it's not a 1080 non-Ti? If it's legit, that's a hell of a deal (it would actually be a great deal even for a non-Ti)

How well does the FE cooler cope with all that TDP? What clocks/temps do you hit? I assume fan is probably cranked close to 100%, do you turn the power limit up?

Paul MaudDib posted:

Yeah, that's not bad. Use GPU-Z and get some readings while you game and see what it looks like, in particular the boost clock.

The cooler you keep it, the higher it'll boost, so you may actually want to just crank the fan up. Especially since the other Pascal overclocking pro-tip is that it's power-limited and the #1 thing you can do is push the "power limit" slider all the way to the stops. Core clocking usually gets some gains, memory OC usually gets some gains, but core voltage often actually hurts due to increased heat/throttling. The best thing you can do for Pascal is just throw power at it and keep it cool. I assume the 1080 Ti probably follows.

Each card will put out ~230W average at stock, or 275W average at the 120% power limit. With 88W for CPU you're at 638W which is fine for your 850W PSU, if it's trustworthy. And you have plenty of headroom even for peak current there.

These days I would just get AIO coolers and a bracket for it, it's about $80 per card (Corsair H55 and NZXT G10, or the $150 EVGA kit if you want to be fancy), but it'll help performance a lot. That's probably one of the more effective ways to increase performance after you're at the "1080 Ti SLI" stage of the game. Maybe get a Noctua or Gentle Typhoon static-pressure-style fan as a replacement for the AIO one too (the defaults tend to be loud). I would think your case has plenty of mounts for the radiator.

repiv posted:

The Witcher 3 doesn't use the GPU PhysX stuff. Here's the list, it's seriously thin these days.

Maybe FLEX will revive GPU PhysX since it's overall simpler and works on AMD GPUs, but that remains to be seen.

SourKraut posted:

Is there an easy guide somewhere on how to get going for something like this? I've got a 980 and would love to just let it mine while I do nothing so as to sell the buttcoins. My wife and I had a baby recently and hey, making easy money on the side from hardware I own sounds great.

MaxxBot posted:

JnnyThndrs posted:

Jesus, people are paying $150 for HD7950's, I only paid $200 for mine new five years ago.

This is insane.

rex rabidorum vires posted:

And despite all this stupidity the Furys seem to have dropped off a bit. That's what I get for waiting. Fun study in economics though.