Anyone having any luck with SL and SLI?

[Kathmandu Gilman]

I know in the past it hasn't worked but perhaps in this new age someone has developed a viewer that can take full advantage of an SLI set up? I have two Nvidia 580's and when in SLI mode SL runs like its 2004 again. Runs fast on single GPU but I want to be able to film with high frame rates in crowded areas. With Fraps and 30 avatars I'm below 20fps which is too low to really get fluid motion.

[Nalates Urriah]

There are people using SLI NVidia settings. I don't know how to set the nVidia control panel to push SL to use all the GPU's. But, I have personally talked with people that are running SLI. 

It does give a speed kick, but not as much as one would expect. The second card is basically just used to decompress textures. 

There are newer OpenGL features being used by the Linden Lab viewer. A new video memory compression algorithm was implemented a few weeks ago. I have no idea if it can use the second video card to help or extend video memory.

Ask around in some of the viewer support groups. When I wrote an article on SL video settings that is how I found the people using SLI. You may need to ask a few times. Try different times of day. Expect lots of people to tell you it can't be done.

You can learn more about how the viewer works and how various hardware affects frame rates by reading: How To get a Faster Second Life and Graphics Tweaking for Second Life. These are getting a bit old. But, there are no new massive changes since they were written.

[Ormand Lionheart]

I never got it to work for well over a year (gtx 460's). Actually it was working in SLI except I went from 200 fps down to 20+ fps. You definitely have to set it up in the Nvidia Control Panel and try your viewers in Fullscreen mode. I did recently talk to someone who said it worked right out of the box for him and since the last time I tried It was bad performance I just went and bought a faster single card (GTX 670). Trying to film 30 avatars at 25+fps is going to be difficult with any system I suspect if you are looking at them all at the same time. Depends on the SIM and the avatars a lot.