Quick (n00b) Question About SLI

[penske2298977]

Does the Nvidia control panel that shows the installed programs have to recognize the game as being installed for SLI to work or is SLI automatically enabled with you start the game/.exe?

Just asking because some (all?) Steam games don't seem to show up under installed programs in the control panel and I usually have to add them manually.

Thanks.

 

[boxleitnerb]

For SLI to work, there have to be so called SLI compatibility bits. They exist for almost all games. These bits will not show up in the game profile of the Nvidia control panel. Nvidia probably doesn't expect their customers to fiddle with those.

I would recommend using Nvidia Inspector, there you can very easily see what games support SLI and what don't and in addition you can access a plethora of inofficial features and settings:

In this example, the SLI bit is "0x084010F5". In the vast majority of cases you don't have to do anything, it just works.
"0x00000004" means SLI disabled btw. Some games like for example Settlers 7 don't properly support SLI, then it is disabled by default.

 

[n0x1ous]

Does the Nvidia control panel that shows the installed programs have to recognize the game as being installed for SLI to work or is SLI automatically enabled with you start the game/.exe?

Just asking because some (all?) Steam games don't seem to show up under installed programs in the control panel and I usually have to add them manually.

Thanks.

No they don't. I have around 50 steam games and only a couple automatically showed up there, but you can go to the steam directory and find the exe and "add" it in there so to speak. that would give you the option of making specific game settings such as Ambient Occlusion, SLI or not for that game, Extra AA Levels, FXAA etc.

But yeah, SLI should work as long as Nvidia made a profile for the game whether it shows up in that list or not.

If you go to the toolbar in Nvidia control panel, the one to the left of the help menu will have "show SLI visual indicator" or something to that effect that will put an overlay of a green bar when you are in game that shows how well its scaling at any given time.