What's "SLI rendering mode" do?

[afireinside]

I found this in my driver settings and it was set to "SLI single-GPU rendering" and there was also multi-GPU and SLI antialiasing. I decided to fire up FEAR and do some testing. Oddly enough at the max res the game lets you pick (like 1100*800 something) I got 40 fps or so. I disabled the nvidia service in task manager and edited the cfg for 1680x1050. I load up FEAR again and get going. single and multi GPU rendering both get me 54 fps average but antialiasing gets me 25fps average. Weird...

Why did my frame rates go UP after chaning the res? Does the nvsvc32 service lock my clocks down to stock or something? What's the difference between these rendering modes? I set it to multi-GPU and left it there... These tests were all run at maximum settings in FEAR and 16af 4aa forced in forcewear drivers. And I locked the cfg file to read only so my res is not setting back to default in FEAR. Either way, I'm blown away by SLI Time to run some necro666 timedemo in quake4...

Does nvsvc32 control AA/AF or something? I remember my q4 time demo geing 77 fps with AA/AF and 120 without AA/AF now I'm getting 119.6 WITH AA/AF and 135 without AA/AF. I'm really confused as to how I gained so much performance just by closing that service... And I ran the timedemo twice to get a correct framerate as the first run gets hdd loading lag that messes with the average.

[saaya]

weird... im getting some weird crossfire results as well ^^
this dual gpu tech is really making things complicated pheew

[afireinside]

Ok I think nvsvc32 is resetting clocks. MM said that with 81.95 and up if he opened NV drivers it would reset any OCs. I loaded up CoD2 in DX9 mode to see if my frame rates improves (they did) and I had artifacts all over. Same with the FEAR benchmark. I backed down from 486 to 475 core and they went away. Also my 3dmark scores went nuts when I OCed the core with this service running. Closing all services or booting diagnostics mode let me OC fine. I'm going to PM charlie and see if this helps him.

[STEvil]

at some resolutions some AA/AF does not work.

[afireinside]

Really? Well I get a frame boost forcing it off so I can assume it is running right?

[ugp]

I noticed when I was using SLI it gave me losts of trouble and FPS was really low in new games for me like F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 2. But in others like Day of Defeat: Souce it was fine and then to the original Day of Defeat it was horrible...so I gave up on SLI and went to x1800XT.

[Elfear]

Make sure you're using the newest Nvidia drivers (81.95's or 81.98's) as the FEAR profile included with them is much better than the previous profile. I'd think with your rig you should be getting better frames. At 1600x1200 4AA/8AF, everything max, SS off, and with my cards at default I average 38fps with 72% above 40fps.

You should be able to run the game at 1680x1050 2AA/8AF with buttery smoothness.

[madgamer]

SLI antialiasing is likely the ultra high end AA modes that you can only run using SLI... http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=Nzk4 there ya go. ATI has this with crossfire as well (different modes though, but its the same type of ultra high quality AA only for 2 gpus). Nice I guess if you are gaming on a monitor that could only do like 1280x1024 or something, but you have a pair of 7800gt cards in SLI or something. even with everything jacked in most games they would still be spewing out way more frames than the monitor could display, so might as well jack those image quality enhancers way up (how about some 16x AA?)