Looking for Opinions on SLI in Overwatch

SLI/CF-X performance and issues vary vastly between different PCs.

I’m using a 1060 6GB, a 960 setup will not be bottlenecked by a 4th gen CPU.

What’s the performance of a 1060 vs a 960? If the price is similar it could be the safer buy, especially if the person can sell his or hers 960.

1060 6GB (3GB version is something like 10% lower due to a lower core count) is within 5% of a 980 IIRC, so there’s a pretty big diff.
If he can get one at a similar price, then yes, I’d recommend it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a 1070 may be close in price too. No clue. Might be too recent though. I actually bought a used 770 on Amazon for the same price as a 970 when the 970 came out, fortunately I was able to return it. Prices are very weird. Hell, what do 980s go for?

Last I checked the 1070s were about twice the price of the 1060s lol
980s can be found second-hand sometimes for around 100€, depends on the sellers.

Should be no bottleneck as far as I know.

Currently running an i5-4690 (soon to be an i7-4790) and 16gb 1833mhz DDR3.

Very little to be honest, from benchmark tests and some research into the subject, I can squeeze a bit more life out of the 960 and the 4th gen intel processors by doing a few second hand upgrades.

I’ll get to a higher performance card eventually, but I’m going to stick with budget increases until then.

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To everyone else, everything I’ve read (and I’ve seen very little) shows an increase in performance in OW, not a decrease

Performance may increase, but SLI can be both unreliable and unstable. You’re probably better off selling your card and getting a 970/980 second-hand instead if you want to improve the performance.

Note: This can vary a ton between different machines, you may end up crashing all the time, or you could end up having much better performance and no crashes at all. My personal experience with multi-gpu setups has been pretty bad, however.

Sli’d a set of 980ti, 1080tis and crossfired R9 280s
Performance improved on all of them(@ higher res. no actual change at my normal settings, perf on 280 did improve in both cases) and wasn’t stuttery except on the 280s.(extremely bad)

Noticeable input delay which is why I ended up just using a single card.(and it didn’t get me a stable 240fps minimum which is the reason I dbled up in the first place)

If you’re gaming competitively I wouldn’t rec doing 2 cards but if you’re trying to run a higher res monitor and don’t mind some input delay then go for it.

And single 280 was maxed out at 1080p so you’ll def. see a bump going sli since the 280 and 960 perform similarly.

First of all what settings are you running? You could probably benefit from lowering certain ones without losing any significant visual quality if your running things on high or ultra.

There are some settings that literally provide little to no noticable change in visuals yet drop performance considerably.

I know you’re asking for hardware suggestions but at least in OW you might not need new parts.

So instead of sli’d 960’s, what’s a better alternative?

I’m definitely going used here, 970, 980 or 980ti? Roughly $90-$130 from what I can see.

Whats your budget? 960 is a pretty old card at this point. The GTX2060 is $350 msrp and comes out on the 15th jan19

SLI scales really well in Overwatch, less so in other titles however. It’s up to you really, it might also be worth upgrading your CPU if it’s behind a few generations. Not really necessary however - it’s more likely going to be a GPU bottleneck (unlike what that other guy said) unless you’re on super low settings.

He should be fine w that cpu until he tries to put out 144 at QHD.

Yikes just noticed that. You should really be going with some DDR4 3200MHz memory with that Intel CPU…

Not sure what other posters are talking about. OW does a great job of utilizing GPU instead of forcing things through a CPU bottleneck (like CS:GO does). In CS:GO, I would actually get lower frames running SLI than just one of my cards. I have 2x 970gtx.

In OW, SLI significantly improves my frames. I have no issue getting constant 200+ fps with 2x 970gtx and a 4790k.

We should be thankful this game runs as well as it does.

I’m struggling to understand why SLI would have any effect on input lag. It shouldn’t.

Just buy a new modern card, don’t waste your money on a old card in SLI.

Google for a better explanation.

If ur actually getting framerate benefits from crossfire/sli then you’re pretty much offsetting the input delay. But at lower or capped framerates it’s a lot more noticeable vs a single card.

From what I’ve seen and my own experience people typically can’t get stable 170-200fps average in actual games(training room doesn’t count). In that situation you should be opting for a single card to reduce the delay.

If you’re using an XX that can only output 60 and sliing that will dbl your framerate to 120 you should opt for sli since that has the lowest delay.

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Just be careful getting ANY insights from how CS:GO handles SLI. I mentioned it above - SLI actually reduced my FPS on CS:GO. It’s a piece of garbage engine, that is based on the the Source engine, that is based on the Goldsrc engine, that is based on the quake 2 engine, that is based on the quake 1 engine. CS:GO is literally still using components from the Quake 1 engine, and that is why it is one of the worst optimized games out right now.

assessment didn’t actually come from the video but from forum posts and personal testing. I’ll keep that in mind though in the future

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