What's the rumors been when it comes to multi-GPU's and the consumer version? Is single card still strongly recommended or will SLI / Crossfire configurations work by then?
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Sure hope so, my 980 sli is especially useless with the Dk2. I primarily run Dcs world, sli works great in nvidia 3d vision but with the Rift it's very bad performance.
Hopefully nvidia comes,through with all that vr direct tech. Won't hold my breath though.
I don't know about Crossfire but SLI works today on DK2. On most games it doesn't have any effect (positive or negative), but I've directly observed a significant benefit using it with Assetto Corsa at least. It's up to developers to support it. Most just don't bother because they already have more on their plates than they can handle.
For the "most promising multi-GPU future", look for info on NVIDIA VR Direct, DirectX 12, and NVIDIA's upcoming GDC talk.
"Tim74UK" wrote: usable without a huge PC price tag.
This is a conflicting statement when it comes to VR unfortunately.
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I find it rather amusing that people expect to run vr on anything but an expensive pc setup. This early in the game brute force is what's needed until such things as nvidia vr direct and other techs come out
There has been rumors that DirectX 12 allows multiple (different) GPUs to work as if they were one single unit. If this is true, then there's nothing stopping you from using multiple GPUs with the Rift (I think). Let's hope those rumors are true...
I agree nVidia will release SLI drivers sometime this year in time for CV1. I don't have any worries about whether this will work now as I found an SLI guide which contained a golden nugget about 3D SLI. If you currently have an nVidia 3D monitor display + shutter glasses you need to render every frame twice, once for each eye which halves your FPS. But, if you have a second card it will render the other eye leaving your fps unaffected. I conclude from this that if we already have perfect 100% scaling for 3D rendering, doing almost exactly the same thing for a stereoscopic HMD is not a problem.
"5b - If you have a game that is good in 3D and does not support SLI, does not benefit from SLI (not "does not support") OR is simply best run with a single video card (which can be forced in nVidia control panel) you can run it off of one video card and turn on 3D, and your second card will simply render the second set of frames perfectly and give absolutely NO drop in FPS. And I mean NONE. When playing paranautical activity (single GPU only) I tried it in 3D to find that my 250+ fps remained consistent in 3D instead of getting it halved. THIS ALSO WORKS WITH GAMES WHICH HAVE ISSUES WITH MULTIPLE CARDS. The issues will not present themselves."
It also means you can crunch some numbers to get a gist of the performance of an SLI CV1 setup. For example if CV1 is 2560x1440 then 1/2 is 1.8megapixels . A 1080p display is 2.0megapixels. So you can look at the fps benchmarks for an nVidia 970/980 at 1080p in whatever game or detail level you like and you should be in the ballpark of the performance you can expect on an VR SLI setup for that card. Of course performance could be worse if a) The screen is higher res b) The render target is much higher than the screen res (if its only a bit higher we do that the 0.2mp difference to play with).
I think GPU is always gonna be an issue with AAA titles, as it has been to play the latest titles e.g elite dangerous unless the GPU issue is sorted or they become cheaper then mass market will be difficult unless more low polygon experiences are made.
We might see comeback of split screen rendering as it would be perfect fit for split screen rendering found in rift. Civilization:Beyond Earth uses Split screen rendering to get lowest possibly latency but only works with Mantle. This is old tech and was not good in bechmarks as workload was never even and framerate increase is way lower then AFR. Workload is not issue with Rift as both sides have about same workload.
