SLI with two 2080s doesn’t work with DirectX 12 playing wow. I have contacted Nvidia about the issue, and they say it is the game developers who have to set up the game for it. I have also contacted Blizzard and they acknowledge the issue exists. After hunting around I have only determined that perhaps such a set up will indeed work by setting up Direct X 11. I did so in game using the setting there to no avail–only one card still. Hence, what now? Has anyone else had any success with this?
Try DX11 legacy see if both cards work. . MultiGPU allows Windows 10 and Direct X 12 to unitize all the active GPU’s in the computer as rendering devices without them being in SLI or even the same brand.
Just wondering why do you need SLI with two RTX 2080s for WoW? Even with max settings at 4k I would think the CPU become a bottleneck still before even maxing out one of those GPUs. Unless your trying game at 8k or something crazy.
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SLI support and profiles have to be built in by the developers. As far as I know there is no logical reason for an MMO to need that kind of computational power (yet) as they are CPU bound. This is changing and will change more in 8.2, however this requires DirectX 12 and a lot of work. Until then SLI is likely off the table for WoW unless NVidia pays Blizzard to do it.
DirectX 11 Legacy–no luck–no change in card usage–still only a singe card. With frame rates set to 120 the system goes there and the one card is functioning at 82% while the other is at 0%. And the temperature of the one card starts to heat up really fast too–that according to CPUID HWMonitor.
what temp is it reaching? The fan curve on the RTX cards is very steep. My RTX 2080 TI the fan does not really spin up until the temp is fairly high
The cards are both blowers and so run hotter than other cards under the same load.
EDIT: Just to update this thread: It turns out the NVLink wasn’t pushed all the way in and to get it all the way on the cards required a lot of force. Now both cards are working. Problem solved.
SLi is essential if you run a 120hz or higher monitor and love to play on ultra settings and/or with MSAA 8x anti aliasing with 200% texture rendering in wow… As without SLI you arent going to push the framerate anywhere near your monitor’s refresh rate, especially if you use 1440 or 4k…
Not sure of 2080s, but with my 1080 ti, everythign maxed out in wow, i barely do around 55fps in boralis and anywhere from 70-90 avg elsewhere, which is no where near my 1440 144hz monitor’s capabilities, but with Sli this would help.
So yes, while WoW is a game that utilizes cpu more for what it does, your graphics cards still determine your overall framerate especially if you use MSAA and up the texture scaling.
Boralus is an example of a place where you are heavily cpu bound.
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Actually it wouldn’t, as I stated in my original post MMOs, and wow in particular are CPU bound. Not GPU bound. So unless you fix the CPU bottleneck the GPUs will largely be sitting idle. I have a 144Hz monitor, I have a 2080, and it doesn’t matter how much GPU I throw at the equation. Boralus/Zandalar will always die on frame-rates because the game is CPU bound in regards to players.
SLI does not fix any of these things and in fact makes it worse, because the CPU must manage the extra GPU it doesn’t just magically scale for free even if SLI works perfectly. Moreover it’s really not useful in modes that make the game less CPU bound (DX12 mode) because of the way that adapters are enumerated to the game engines now.
This is literal code I have from a DX12 test project, taken pretty much line by line from a Microsoft sample:
void D3D12Imager::GetHardwareAdapter(IDXGIFactory4* pFactory, IDXGIAdapter1** ppAdapter)
{
wrl::ComPtr<IDXGIAdapter1> adapter;
*ppAdapter = nullptr;
for (UINT adapterIndex = 0; DXGI_ERROR_NOT_FOUND != pFactory->EnumAdapters1(adapterIndex, &adapter); ++adapterIndex)
{
DXGI_ADAPTER_DESC1 desc;
adapter->GetDesc1(&desc);
if (desc.Flags & DXGI_ADAPTER_FLAG_SOFTWARE)
{
// Don't select the Basic Render Driver adapter.
// If you want a software adapter, pass in "/warp" on the command line.
continue;
}
// Check to see if the adapter supports Direct3D 12, but don't create the
// actual device yet.
if (SUCCEEDED(D3D12CreateDevice(adapter.Get(), D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_1, _uuidof(ID3D12Device), nullptr)))
{
break;
}
}
*ppAdapter = adapter.Detach();
}
I do not get SLI systems as a single adapter as I would in DX11. I get each device as a separate entity because the rule from Microsoft is that developers, not drivers need to decide how to best make use of each device.
A final note: Multi-GPU support in general has been dropping away because it’s more of a pain than it’s worth to support, and the single card setups are generally more than capable of handling the load.
This may not be the most technical of youtubers… but he’s right on the money:
Not exactly many newer dx 12 programs have switched to multi GPU which is not SLI. Multi GPU allows the use of all of the GPU’s in the computer regardless of the make and model.
Well not sure of a CPU Bottleneck, as current wow does support multithreading these days, and I have a Ryzen 9 3900x in my system, so any cpu bottleneck is non-existent in my build but there shouldnt be any with even any average 4 core cpu from even years ago with wow… and can say from my day of experience with SLI, it does make a notable improvement to fps even in Boralis. Not as much improvement as other zones where I am able to push into the hundred+ fps range, but still a significant difference… In Boralis with SLI I go from Non-tolerable fps to tolerable fps… (from 25-35 fps to 55-65 fps)
This should tell you without a doubt that WoW is graphics dependent (not cpu) when you push settings and especially are in new zones.
Also further to note, the 2 GPUs aren’t sitting at idle at all when you max everything.
Here’s 1x 1080 Ti SLI Disabled:
~https://i.imgur.com/W21rf29.jpg
As you can see I am sitting between 30-35fps
Here’s 2x 1080 Ti SLI Enabled:
~https://i.imgur.com/MRydmmi.jpg
sitting between 55-60fps
And as you can see in MSI Afterburner monitor that’s showing, the two GPUs are far from “sitting idle”
Simply put, SLI enabled in wow doubles my framerate with everything maxed out in game and in Nvidia’s Control Panel:
True for AAA level games, but it’s not exactly what I would call common yet. There might be more games supporting RTX right now.
I can’t speak to your experience, I can speak to hard facts. If you swapped your motherboard and CPU to intel 9900k and cranked it up to 5.0GHz that bottleneck would be severely lessened. The issue is that WoW despite multi-core improvements in 8.1 and 8.2 still heavily relies on one core and base clock speed. SLI probably buys you some fancy post processing bandwidth but at the end of the day if you wanted raw frames with WoW it’s not core count that matters but IPC and base clock. That said that is a good CPU, but it is definitely still the bottleneck as far as WoW goes in that system. This is empirical and well documented.
Either way I’m not going to convince you, I don’t recommend dual GPU setups as they are largely a waste of money with today’s hardware and the level of support available. The theory is good, the reality however is a major stretch from that theory. Irrespective I don’t see continuing this conversation as constructive. Peace.
The GPUs aren’t fully utilized, you really aren’t getting much benefit here. I suspect there is something else going on. Given that SLI doesn’t double VRam it shouldn’t be that, but you should be getting higher framerates than you are on a single GPU.
Try that same setup in an SLI enabled AAA game fully cranked on ultra, those both will be pegged at 100%. Not 50%.
the 50s were the temps of the cards.
take another look:
`https://i.imgur.com/Drg9DUk.jpg
Cards are being 85-95% utilized.
Kinda weird to disregard the fact that my CPU didnt change but just simply by throwing a second graphics card into the mix with SLI, doubled my framerate. nothing more convincing than SLI doing what exactly what players expect and desire and is the #1 reason many do SLI builds: give them the ability to achieve higher framerates at max settings…
…and with WoW this is exactly what happened. SLI off and every setting cranked to max, only able to achieve an intolerable 30 fps on my 1440 monitor, but sli enabled, and that becomes a playable 60fps.
And if i don’t crank the settings to max (AA off or set to CMAA), render scale default 100% instead of 200% and graphic slider set to recommended 7 instead of 10, and outside of a main city, it’s the same result but just greater numbers, for example in Goldshire, i’m fluctuating anywhere from 80-200 fps with a single card and 150-300 fps SLI