WoW + SLI On Vista64?

A friend of mine plays WoW religiously and recently upgraded from XP32 to Vista64 to take advantage of 4GB of RAM. He said performance under XP was great and noticed a "HUGE" increase when he moved to SLI. Now he says that performance under Vista64 with SLI is worse than single-card in XP. Anyone have experience with this?

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this i would like to know as well....if so ima be so saddd

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I remember hearing about this same issue on hardocp the other day...maybe give it a try?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945149

SYMPTOMS
In some scenarios, games and benchmarks perform more poorly than expected on a Windows Vista-based computer. This issue occurs when the games and the benchmarks use multiple display adapters in a Linked Display Adapter (LDA) configuration.

CAUSE
A graphics processing unit (GPU) or part of a GPU link may incur a small scheduling latency on a new Direct Memory Access (DMA) packet. This is true if the DMA packet is submitted to the GPU that has previously run out of work and if another GPU in the linked configuration is very busy. In some scenarios, significant starvation of one or more GPUs in the linked configuration reduces the expected performance of an application.

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Stiffler wrote:

A friend of mine plays WoW religiously and recently upgraded from XP32 to Vista64 to take advantage of 4GB of RAM. He said performance under XP was great and noticed a "HUGE" increase when he moved to SLI. Now he says that performance under Vista64 with SLI is worse than single-card in XP. Anyone have experience with this?

Just caught you in a fib. If this person plays Wow then they do not have enough time to make friends Wink

wildcard wrote:

I remember hearing about this same issue on hardocp the other day...maybe give it a try?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945149

SYMPTOMS
In some scenarios, games and benchmarks perform more poorly than expected on a Windows Vista-based computer. This issue occurs when the games and the benchmarks use multiple display adapters in a Linked Display Adapter (LDA) configuration.

CAUSE
A graphics processing unit (GPU) or part of a GPU link may incur a small scheduling latency on a new Direct Memory Access (DMA) packet. This is true if the DMA packet is submitted to the GPU that has previously run out of work and if another GPU in the linked configuration is very busy. In some scenarios, significant starvation of one or more GPUs in the linked configuration reduces the expected performance of an application.

Yeah, he already tried applying the hotfix and it didn't do anything.

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Cheerio, let's do it again.

Vista 64 is clearly not ready for prime time yet.

DarthBeavis wrote:

Vista 64 is clearly not ready for prime time yet.

It's not necessarily a Vista64 problem. It could very well be Nvidia or Blizzard. I've been using Vista64 with no problem for a long time. My only gripe is Cisco not putting out a 64bit VPN Client.

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Cheerio, let's do it again.

As far as I understood WoW does not support SLI. I have had SLI working 'once' when I was running WinXP, but upon going to Vista (32 or 64) I have never seen WoW take advantage of SLI. As a matter of fact, my framerate almost doubles when I 'DISABLE' SLI.

If you find a solution, I would be interested!

Crossfire works in every game though?

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zugzug

Why do you need SLI for WoW is the real question... Shocked

30" monitor?

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zugzug

maybe he is using 8600gt's

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Q6600 @4.3 | 4870x2

Syn wrote:

As far as I understood WoW does not support SLI. I have had SLI working 'once' when I was running WinXP, but upon going to Vista (32 or 64) I have never seen WoW take advantage of SLI. As a matter of fact, my framerate almost doubles when I 'DISABLE' SLI.

If you find a solution, I would be interested!

"wow not supporting SLI" and "wow not taking advantage of SLI" are 2 completely different things.

Wow is an officially supported SLI title, as shown on http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html

However, that does not mean that you will get a huge performance gain if you're running 2x8800's and only play the game at 1024x768...

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Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!

wildcard wrote:

Syn wrote:

As far as I understood WoW does not support SLI. I have had SLI working 'once' when I was running WinXP, but upon going to Vista (32 or 64) I have never seen WoW take advantage of SLI. As a matter of fact, my framerate almost doubles when I 'DISABLE' SLI.

If you find a solution, I would be interested!

"wow not supporting SLI" and "wow not taking advantage of SLI" are 2 completely different things.

Wow is an officially supported SLI title, as shown on http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html

However, that does not mean that you will get a huge performance gain if you're running 2x8800's and only play the game at 1024x768...

Go to google and type WoW SLI and you'll see results from people who think it's not supported (a lot of results as a matter of fact). I do understand that Nvidia supports it as SLI, but that means nothing to me.

Here's what matters... Running WoW at 1600x1200 with all visual settings at high with SLI enabled gives me about 25-30FPS in Ironforge. Running WoW at 1600x1200 with all visual settings at high with SLI "disabled" gives me about 60-100FPS in Ironforge (consistently).

You do the math. I understand that Nvidia 'supports' it, however I don't think Blizzard does (and I'm not the only one who thinks this).

-Syn

PS. I'm using 7800GTX's per my signature.

Syn wrote:

wildcard wrote:

Syn wrote:

As far as I understood WoW does not support SLI. I have had SLI working 'once' when I was running WinXP, but upon going to Vista (32 or 64) I have never seen WoW take advantage of SLI. As a matter of fact, my framerate almost doubles when I 'DISABLE' SLI.

If you find a solution, I would be interested!

"wow not supporting SLI" and "wow not taking advantage of SLI" are 2 completely different things.

Wow is an officially supported SLI title, as shown on http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html

However, that does not mean that you will get a huge performance gain if you're running 2x8800's and only play the game at 1024x768...

Go to google and type WoW SLI and you'll see results from people who think it's not supported (a lot of results as a matter of fact). I do understand that Nvidia supports it as SLI, but that means nothing to me.

Here's what matters... Running WoW at 1600x1200 with all visual settings at high with SLI enabled gives me about 25-30FPS in Ironforge. Running WoW at 1600x1200 with all visual settings at high with SLI "disabled" gives me about 60-100FPS in Ironforge (consistently).

You do the math. I understand that Nvidia 'supports' it, however I don't think Blizzard does (and I'm not the only one who thinks this).

-Syn

PS. I'm using 7800GTX's per my signature.

Do the same google search and in many of those forums you will find people that have no problems with WoW and SLI, inluding myself (when I used to run SLI).

Here's what matters: My 8800's ran WoW fine at 1680x1050 in SLI with no performance loss (no gain either, which is why I seperated my 8800's into 2 different systems, and each one continues to run wow at max settings perfectly).

Did you try posting in the WoW Tech support forums? Blue's answer all the time in that forum, and I'd be interested to see if its "a known problem" "not our issue" or something else entirely.

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Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!

Thank you Stiffler for posting

Here is what is going on:

I was running 32bit windows with, 2x EVGA Nvidia 8800GTS. Frame rate ran around 100-400 FPS while using SLI with the Video settings set to max. Load times how ever for arena’s instances, anything where there was a loading screen took a lot longer then a p4 machine I had sitting next to me.

Stiffler suggested I upgrade to an x64 OS, Doing so and adding 2gb of ram cut those load times by 75% at least but my frame rate dropped from 100+ to less then 30 anywhere in the game. If I enter a major city or try using a graphic intense spell my FPS goes to about 9-10 for the duration of the action.

Several hours have been spent applying patches, from; M$, Nivida, and EVGA, nothing seems to help. At this point I’d rather have long load times in place for frame lag.

not sure this info will help, but thought maybe getting down the specifics might trigger a lightbulb

-Thank you for your time
kslick

Jeeze... I stand corrected and I apologize. For some reason I thought I was still running with an nForce 4 mobo when in fact it's a 590 board.

SLI is fixed in WoW for me.

-Syn