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SLI : any good for 3dsmax?


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sure it ll do good in production,,

 

Y ur viewport become heavy and jerky with complex meshes ? its due to lack of graphic memmory, and its processing power... those things u see in viewport is all up to ur graphic card,,

 

so imagine in an archvis animation ,,ur cam is running smoothly with 25 frames or more per sec on a viewport,

 

y u use dual xeons and dual optrons on workstations ?

 

and when it comes in realtime rendering , like that happening in viewports , SLI is usefull.....

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I started to look into SLI on my new workstation, but then I found out that they only work with one monitor. Generally I find having the dual monitor setup to be indispensable when working in Max, so I stopped researching. But I assume since you can have the workstation class Quadro cards set up in SLI, that it would work in Max, but don't quote me on that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The Quadros are nice but in my opinion the "gaming" cards can be adaquate for most users. I bought a quadro years ago for an insaine amount of money and although I got good viewport frame rates it just didnt justify the extra money just to get a little better viewport performance. Since then Ive been running the high end gaming cards and with the savings Ive been able to upgrade to faster cpu's or more ram or storage space which to me is more important. BTW Im currently running an nvidia 7800GTX and love it.

 

Just my $0.02

 

-dave

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Definition: SLI is short for Scalable Link Interface. SLI is proprietary to Nvidia graphics cards and is a method of allowing two graphics cards of the same model to be linked and share the load of rendering the graphics on screen. Using two graphics cards linked via SLI greatly improves the performance of the system by rendering the graphics faster. Often up to a 2 times improvement is seen.

 

actualy, 3DFX came first with SLI

 

but i think it's all with drivers, if they get them work with 4 viewports in same time, there should be an improvement in viewport rendering. Till now, that's not the case.

Look for tests on benchmarking sites, if there is a comparison in e.g. Cinebench2003 test with/out SLI one can see the improvement, as i recall, there is none :) so, setting up a SLI, should give you the same speed as one card.

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errr, sorry, i have to discredit myself. I've asked a friend to try some scenes from old benchmark (since 3dsmax4) with some SLI cards.

With openGL viewport driver isn't any faster, but with direct3D, look at the attachment.

GF 6600 SLI, a64 3500+

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  • 2 weeks later...

hi all members , its the first time im writing here and i need help ...

i bought geforce 6800gt graphic card (leadtek com.) sli techno., well when u read about it the nvidia asking for a sli motherboared from asus ..im an architect and working on 3d designs + animation ..using autodek viz 2006

i asked someone about the sli motherboards and he told me nothing will change with u because of the sli technology ! specially with the 3d max and autodesk viz , maya ,so dont worry , but i told him that i bought this graphic card and i wanted to know if i can work on an ordinary motherboard ( intel 955: 8MG, 2 pci express x16 and extra specifications ( and its like the sli motherboards asus , gigabyte...) so i wanted to know if ill buy the sli motherboard that deal with my grphic card , or buy theintel 945 or intel 955 motherboard that dont deal with sli techno. ? and im working on 3d programs for 12 hours a day

im afarid that the other motherboards dont work with my graphic card and will make errors ..and i wanted to know if the sli help in rendering ... and belive me i didnt take the card for game ! im an architect ,and i want to know if error appear after a while not immediately ,asking for sli motherboad and ur system is not working properly , thanks all memebres for any help u will give me , im waiting for the answers from experts ,bye

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errr, sorry, i have to discredit myself. I've asked a friend to try some scenes from old benchmark (since 3dsmax4) with some SLI cards.

With openGL viewport driver isn't any faster, but with direct3D, look at the attachment.

GF 6600 SLI, a64 3500+

:confused:

first time I see some real benefiet in 3DS MAX

can you post whole 3dsmax4 test? (both with MAXtreme, if you can someSoftQuadro mode)

pozdrav!

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it was a 3dsmax8 test, with these (3dsmax4) files as shown in the graph, custom01.max is one of my scenes, and we picked the most demanding/interesting ones to do the testing in more reasonable time :)

no maxtreme test, 6600 PEG versions isn't modable (at least, it wasn't few months ago)

 

custom013id.th.png

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  • 1 year later...

Hi, I'm new here, so if this is somewhere else on the forum, please excuse me.

 

I have read that if you want dual monitor setups with some SLi performance, you can install a third, albeit lower performance card in your PC, using the smaller PCI-Express slots on your board.

 

Use the dual card configuration for your SLi monitor, and the third card for tutorials, web pages and the like that you may want to use on the second screen.

 

Some discussion I have read specified that with current nVidia drivers, it will automatically disable *all* other cards if you have SLi enabled - so the recommendation was to get an ATI card as the third. I haven't done it so can't really comment on experience, but may well do it in the near future, and will let you know how it goes.

 

--Edit:

Here is a link to the article: http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t6269.html

 

It details some links to some PCI-E graphics cards that support 4x too.

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  • 3 weeks later...
After playing around with 3dMax and enabling SLi, I have noticed I can render many more polygons in my viewports and it seems really much more fluid. I'm using DirectX. Anyone else had any experience with it?

 

Matt. please try to bench w/this benchmark viewport script for 3dsmax

 

http://rapidshare.com/files/3108339/bmark4.rar.html

 

unrar, and run it, check the results, please check on "display all triangle edges " for D3d settings

 

THANX!!!

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

Hi Guys,

 

I currently own 2 old 3D machines - they both run 3dsmax & After Effects as their main apps - both are on there last legs though, and they both have a Quadro FX 3450 each.

 

I was thinking of building a new machine using both the Quadro FX 3450s in SLi mode - does anyone know whether this is worth it or not??

 

If so where would be the best place to look for motherboards that can accomodate 2 x Quadro FX 3450s??

 

Any recommendations??

 

Thanks

Gee

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