SLI - Dual Nividia Cards work in MAX?

[Anonymous]

Can anyone tell me if MAX will benefit from Nvidias SLI architecture? Wondering if running 2 cards will increase viewport performance.

[eodeo]

As I said many times:

No.

Max and 99.9% of professional applications do not recognize second and any other additional cards.

Get the best single card out there.

From nvidia, that is gtx 280.

From ati (and in general) its hd 4870.

Dont bother with sli/crossfire/x2. They mean nothing to max and most other software. Games are the only ones that can use the extra horsepower and in truth, they are the only ones that really need it.

[Anonymous]

I would hope that 3D apps will eventually take advantage of SLI technology. I find it somewhat missleading how Nvidias promotes SLI technology for their Quadro cards as shown below;

Form Nvidias Site;

1. SLI Frame Rendering: Combines two identical NVIDIA Quadro PCI Express graphics cards with an SLI connector to transparently scale application performance on a single display by presenting them as a single graphics card to the operating system.

2. SLI FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing): Combines two identical NVIDIA Quadro PCI Express graphics cards with an SLI connector to transparently scale image quality on a single display by presenting them as a single graphics card to the operating system.

[eodeo]

It’s a pickle no doubt about that, but multiple GPUs is not the bottleneck of our current workstations.

Its viewport’s inability to use more than one CPU core. Optimization for parallelization is the next big thing, and current GPUs are much faster than current CPUs can handle.

Once viewports start being able to use 2 or more cores, we will reach point one day when even GPU could use a 2nd sibling.

[Anonymous]

geeze... I already built my workstation as a SLI ready machine using the Nvidia 790i Ultra motherboard. Below are the specs;

2.83 ghz Quad Core Q9550 12mb FSB
EVGA nforce 790i Ultra motherboard
8 gig Corsair DDR3 1333mhz Ram
Win XP Pro x64 bit
Quadro FX3700 gfx 512 DDR3
4 x 500gig RAID 0+1 (total 1 TB storage)
850 Watt True Power Quattro PS
Samsumg 27" LCD

[eodeo]

Like you probably know, you have a very decent computer.

Problem is you probably paid it way more than its worth. To see almost identical computer with noticeably faster GPU and slightly slower CPU at stock speeds, see my post here:
area.autodesk.com/forum/Autodesk-3ds-Max/installation---hardware---os/rendering-super-computer---help-and-advice-needed/#70544

it’s the best cost/effective system at the moment.


SLI is good for new games on large monitor, but you probably didnt get quadro 3700 (gf 8800gt chip) for gaming.

[Anonymous]

I was doing very well with keeping the $$$ realistic until I got the idea of making the system SLI ready. The extra cost of the motherboard wasnt much of an issue, it was the RAM. Apparently the nForce 790i boards are very finniky with RAM compatibility - especially with the 2x2 Gig strips and the fact that DDR2 ram wont work.. Corsair was the only locally available ram that has been tested and supported for use on this particular MB.

Im sure I could have gone the on-line route, but decided to stick with local suppliers - just incase things dont work out.

One thing I notices is apparent is the distinct differences of peoples view of the Quadro vrs Gaming cards. I noticed on the 3DS Max forum most people seem to agree that Geforce is perfered, whilst on the Softimage XSI forums most recommend Quadro. ... my head is spinning.

[eodeo]

Max forum most people seem to agree that Geforce is perfered, whilst on the Softimage XSI forums most recommend Quadro

Its actually not that complicated.

I don’t use XSI, so I cant tell for sure, but I’d be willing to bet a month supply of candy that XSI is OpenGL based and it has no DirectX support.

1) OpenGL is slower than DX 100x on average. This is on professional cards that don’t have special set of driver instructions to kill its window OpenGL performance.

2) Geforce cards are not as lucky. They have a special code in drivers to seek out and recognize non quadro cards and implement 10-100x slowing in OpenGL tasks. Seeing how most “professional” applications use(d) OpenGL it was a quick and dirty distinction that gave Quadro cards a hefty boost in performance.

Some people have hard time accepting 1) and their software doesn’t have DX support. When you multiply base 100 (default slowness of OGL compared to DX) by another 100 (crippling in drivers) you get a fact that you have a 10,000x slower card, than it would doing the same thing in DX.

Max supports DX and using non professional cards yealds no special penalties along with hefty boost at start. That is why you can see 1000x slower results in OpenGL when using non workstation cards in 3ds Max.

Ultimately, it’s the users of software like XSI that suffer the most, since they’re not only forced to use outdated OpenGL, as if it wasn’t slow enough to begin with, have it slowed down further by not having a workstation card.

---

In short DX good, OpenGL bad. Software supporting DX = much better performance and no need for special “professional” card.

Thank MS for working their ars off to make 3d API that could battle OpenGL. It started out as an underdog, and now, due to lack of innovation to OpenGL, it has surpassed it many times.

If you’re interested in learning more about quadro scam: area.autodesk.com/forum/Autodesk-3ds-Max/3ds-max-through-2008/viewport-issues-with-maxtreme-10/Page-10/#48487
If you’re interested more in DX vs OpenGL: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-directx,2019.html