SLI or Not

[Skyhawk7]

Good Day Fellow Builders,

I have a question regarding SLI which I am not familiar with at all.
I am currently running P3D v3.3.5 AND FSX.   I have three (3) GTX980 video cards each running a 50"-4K TV.  The graphics are quite good, better in P3D but not as good as I think I can get it to be.
My question is: If I place an SLI bridge across all 3 video cards and use only 1 50" TV, will that increase the graphics in either FSX or P#D or both?
I am getting mixed messages from different people and figured I would appeal to the Experts!
Any comments?
Thank you so much.

[quid246]

Look at your single GPU usage... is it maxing out?

[Skyhawk7]

Thanks for answering me.  Just so I understand you correctly, I should check the GPU usage on each card?  Right now I have (3) separate GTX980 cards. Each one is running a separate 4K TV.  What I am inquiring about is can I only use 1 4K TV and use all 3 video cards for greater graphics.   That said, should I check the GPU usage on all three cards?   Just want to make sure I'm doing the correct thing as I'm not familiar with this at all.
Thanks again.

[quid246]

AFAIK SLI will not quite have the benefits you will see in "non-legacy" games and what not... as P3D is built on such an old code base and the SLI implementations are relatively young.

My guess is that you will get a slight performance boost using SLI if doing one view... but with three views, I can't really say.  Only way to is give it a shot and document everything.

[a340-th]

I am SLI' íng with P3D3.3.5, 2 GTX980Tis and 3 x 55 " screens at 1920 X 1080.

Nowadays (with version 3.3.5) it seems to me that there is a slight improvement in running SLI compared to 2 screens on 1 card and 1 on the second one. I am also using view groups as opposed to 3 undocked views which helps performance. I do not do surround.

But the best thing really is to try it out. Its not complicated, connect the cards with their connectors, attach all 3 screens to the first card (is a must for SLI), then make the setting in the driver and try it.

[airupthere]

Brand new here, but I'll share what I know. I'm a software guy by trade (write code for a living).. Even the triple-A titles like Grand Theft Auto, and what-not, struggle with SLI. The defacto standard for SLI would be a game like Tomb Raider. It would seem that doubling the card, doubles the power (i.e. more frames / sec.) however, it does not. Tomb Raider is the best, and it gets about 1.8x FPS over a single card.

It gets even worse if you triple-SLI the cards. Unless you have absolute money to burn, your FPS / $ ratio is extremely poor for three cards. I would love to hear your numbers for triple-SLI, and dual SLI.

So, I agree with the previous poster.. Just test it, but I wouldn't be surprised if you don't really get the bump in FPS that you would hope. Best of luck!

For what it's worth, I have dual EVGA GTX 970 FTW in SLI.

[Sam Llorca]

From what I've read on forums SLI is not recommended!
You'll have no improvements at all, P3d is CPU hungry not GPU.
but it don't hurt to try if you don't mind spending the extra $$

[RayS]

What would be really cool is if software vendors could assign engines to specific cards...

eg:
Assign the cloud engine and AI Traffic engine to Card A, Main Sim to Card B and then pipe or blend the results together.

[Sam Llorca]

That would be a great solution Ray!

[jonesthesoftware]

Hi SKYHAWK
is your question to improve the graphics quality or the frame rate?
SLI linking will  improve frame rate but graphics quality is down to screen resolution and the original quality of the graphics of the software. Similarly graphihcs drawn in say 1280x1080 designed for a 24 inch screen and expanded to a 50 inch screen are not going to be very good.
As a matter of interest why would you want to go to a single screen from 3 screens?
geoff