Does 7DTD benefit from two GPUs (non-SLI/CF)?

[BlackhawkUH60E]

This is a very technical question. I hope a developer can answer.

 

I sometimes play at a friends place and his second PC only has a NVIDIA Quadro 4000 GPU.

I get around 15-20 fps, which is playable, but not perfect.

I know this is not the best GPU for this, even worse than minimum requirements, but the GPU prices are insane at the moment, so I have to come up with another solution.

 

So: I have a NVIDIA Tesla K80 lying around, which is just an accelerator without video output connectors. Would 7DTD benefit from this second GPU?

Doesn't even matter to me if I have to switch to OpenGL or Vulkan.

 

EDIT: forgot to mention: newest Windows 10, an unknown 6-Core AMD CPU, 16 GB RAM.

Edited February 27, 2021 by BlackhawkUH60E (see edit history)

[Fox]

I doubt it. SLI is dead to most / all games. Even Nvidia admitted to that. If anything, you might receive stability issues with this game in SLI mode.

 

GPU prices will likely be high for the next year or two... maybe even longer depending how long covid lasts.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Fox (see edit history)

[BlackhawkUH60E]

It seems you didn't read my thread title correctly. It's about non-SLI and about what DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan and 7DTD's programming can do or not.

Edited February 27, 2021 by BlackhawkUH60E (see edit history)

[Roland]

If you want a developer to respond your best chance is to use a notification like @Alloc or @faatal. Otherwise there is little chance they will notice your post in General Discussions. They still might not answer but at least they will get a ping for it. They'll get it now since I just used them. 

[BlackhawkUH60E]

@Roland Thank you very much. Didn't know that.

I didn't know where else to put this question. It's not really a support ticket and also there is no technical subforum.

 

[SylenThunder]

As far as I'm aware, there is little improvement with SLI. Game client is still CPU-bound.

[push2drop]

Hi,

 

the "correct" way to do this would be to run it on a server OS with hypervisor and then assign the two GPUs on the K80 to a number of VMs. See the following link for hints... Whether that will work for gaming remains to be seen... and of course you would only game via a VM console viewer program...

 

https://arrayfire.com/using-gpus-kvm-virutal-machines/

 

Another way would be to use a hacked gpu bios and/or driver to get make the card work for the 3d stuff and route the output through the on-chip gpu of your i5 or i7... like in that LTT video... but that probably only happens if some chinese hardware refurbisher has a few thousand last gen mining cards at hand... and in the current situation, not at all...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4

 

push2drop

 

[BlackhawkUH60E]

@SylenThunder The question is about non-SLI.

 

@push2drop Thank you, but that doesn't really answer my question.

I already have the Quadro 4000 with video connectors as the first GPU.

[push2drop]

Hi,

 

if you want the easy way to plug it in and start windows, the answer is no - NVidia provides no drivers to run this as a GPU - only compute workloads.

 

As for performance, the GK210 is basically double the GK110B of the original Titan Z or 780 Ti - just with more memory (24GB vs 6GB or 3GB and a bit higher boost clock). Even with only one of the two GPUs used it would run circles around the GF100 in your Quadro 4000 - if you had a driver to run 3D workloads on it.

 

push2drop

[Canute]

Both card's are designed to work at server/workstations not in gamingdesktop's.

The Tesla K80 is an accelerator, which enhance the quadro 4000, but at which way it would enhance your ingame fps or quality i can't say.

Just plug the card in and test it.

But you get better results in buying a cheapest modern gaming videocard or a bit more expensive from the last generation.

 

 

[BlackhawkUH60E]

@push2drop That's not true. The last driver version for the Quadro 4000, namely 378.78, does also support the K80.

And since both have DirectX/OpenGL support and 7DTD also can use them, in theory the drivers and graphics output shouldn't be a problem.

So my question still stands if 7DTD would benefit from it. If Unity and the 7DTD programming could do it.

 

@Canute I also thought about just testing it. The problem is that the current PSU is not enough. I would have to rig up another PSU, which i also have lying around, just for the K80 and I would like to know if it's worth the effort beforehand.

Even an old 780 Ti costs over 200 Euro at the moment, which I'm not willing to pay. (Crazy Bitcoin miners are to blame.)

 

EDIT: looked up and corrected the price for 780 Ti.

Edited February 28, 2021 by BlackhawkUH60E (see edit history)

[Fox]

You're asking us a question in which I doubt anyone here has the answer to. Using non-gaming hardware for gaming is a rare thing to be doing, and using old non-gaming hardware is even more rare.

 

Just do what you think is best suited for yourself and go from there.

[BlackhawkUH60E]

@Fox Like I stated in my first post, this question was directed to the developers. Even if it takes some time or I don't get an answer at all.

I didn't expect the gamers to have an answer to that.

[push2drop]

4 hours ago, BlackhawkUH60E said:

@push2drop That's not true. The last driver version for the Quadro 4000, namely 378.78, does also support the K80.

And since both have DirectX/OpenGL support and 7DTD also can use them, in theory the drivers and graphics output shouldn't be a problem.

So my question still stands if 7DTD would benefit from it. If Unity and the 7DTD programming could do it.

 

 

Many people have tried to get the now quite cheap Tesla K series cards to run 3d - I haven't heard of anybody succeeding. The closest to success was somebody doing some reflow soldering to change one resistor to make a K10 (compute only) into an otherwise identical Grid K2 (may actually do 3d, albeit only for virtualisation workloads) and then managed to get it to run in some ancient version of Citrix Xenserver (before NVidia and Citrix started to charge extra for that kind of GPU virtualisation) - and that would have meant running Win7 guests...

Unfortunately the K80 has no identical Grid Version... and even then it's not like you can run a Tesla Grid card with a normal game ready driver under Win10.

 

As for your claim that the 378.78 game ready driver supports the K80 - I believe it, when I see it. Actually the Quadro 4000 is also not listed as supported for that driver, but since it is not a "compute only card" and the consumer variants with the same chip are supported, it might still work...

 

push2drop

 

 

[Fox]

2 hours ago, BlackhawkUH60E said:

@Fox Like I stated in my first post, this question was directed to the developers. Even if it takes some time or I don't get an answer at all.

I didn't expect the gamers to have an answer to that.

The developers are exactly that... developers. What makes you think they might be knowledgeable enough in computer hardware to answer this unique question about workstation hardware not officially supported by games? Hell, I'm an experienced hardware technician with 3 years of college and several years in the field and even I can't properly answer this question.

 

Can workstation hardware run well with games, it's possible, but not likely to be completely stable with all games. Would adding a hardware booster (which is essentially what I think that k80 is) make a difference in gaming, probably at least a little. Would it make games run more unstable... probably. Is it worth it, that's entirely up to you. Personally, I'd rather just build a proper new gaming rig. Leave games for games and server / workstation stuff for servers / workstations.

 

Just trying to save you from wasting your time here, that's all.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Fox (see edit history)

[BlackhawkUH60E]

@push2drop Sorry, little mistake by me, I wrote the wrong version number. it's 377.83.

 

https://www.nvidia.de/download/driverResults.aspx/130247/de

The K80 is not listed there, but it's in the INF and also in the ListDevices.txt, so both cards can use the same driver.

 

Rarly Nvidia even brings out driver packages which combine game drivers with workstation drivers. Then the Nvidia control panel even shows the options for both cards!

And I definitely know that such a setup works, with drivers/output and all, because I did that 2 or 3 years ago with a 9800 GTX and three! Tesla C1060.

(Just looked it up in my old backups. It was driver version 341.44.)

 

EDIT: I thought about your idea to let it render on the K80 and only output on the Quadro 4000. And I watched your YT link above and read up some more about that. I think I will try out to trick the Nvidia driver to do that. Just out of pure cuiosity

 

@Fox Because the developers could know if Unity and 7DTD are prgrammed in a way, that it could do different rendering threads on diffeent GPUs through DirectX or OpenGL. If they don't know, they could answer "We don't know, we never tested two GPUs" and I would be happy with that answer.

 

I know it's not the best setup, but like I said there is not really a choice, because of the current GPU prices.

And I'm not asking for games in general for this setup. I'm only asking for 7DTD, because this second PC only exists for 7DTD

Edited March 1, 2021 by BlackhawkUH60E (see edit history)

[Pichii]

On 2/27/2021 at 9:07 AM, BlackhawkUH60E said:

This is a very technical question. I hope a developer can answer.

 

I sometimes play at a friends place and his second PC only has a NVIDIA Quadro 4000 GPU.

I get around 15-20 fps, which is playable, but not perfect.

I know this is not the best GPU for this, even worse than minimum requirements, but the GPU prices are insane at the moment, so I have to come up with another solution.

 

So: I have a NVIDIA Tesla K80 lying around, which is just an accelerator without video output connectors. Would 7DTD benefit from this second GPU?

Doesn't even matter to me if I have to switch to OpenGL or Vulkan.

 

EDIT: forgot to mention: newest Windows 10, an unknown 6-Core AMD CPU, 16 GB RAM.

SLI/Xfire only works if you have two identical chips and they have to be configured. I dont think 7d2d supports SLI/Crossfire tho so ima say negative.

[BlackhawkUH60E]

@Pichii The question is about non-SLI/CF.

 

 

[push2drop]

18 hours ago, BlackhawkUH60E said:

https://www.nvidia.de/download/driverResults.aspx/130247/de

The K80 is not listed there, but it's in the INF and also in the ListDevices.txt, so both cards can use the same driver.

 

Rarly Nvidia even brings out driver packages which combine game drivers with workstation drivers. Then the Nvidia control panel even shows the options for both cards!

And I definitely know that such a setup works, with drivers/output and all, because I did that 2 or 3 years ago with a 9800 GTX and three! Tesla C1060.

(Just looked it up in my old backups. It was driver version 341.44.)

 

EDIT: I thought about your idea to let it render on the K80 and only output on the Quadro 4000. And I watched your YT link above and read up some more about that. I think I will try out to trick the Nvidia driver to do that. Just out of pure cuiosity

 

Once again, Tesla cards are compute only. So if you want to get your Blender models render faster, they can do that (as Blender uses CUDA to access them). Or if you have other compute tasks as pointed out here https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/12-things-tesla-accelerated-computing-platform/

 

That is also why your K80 is in the driver inf files... CUDA uses the driver to access the hardware.

 

But I would be most astonished if that driver lets you use a Tesla for Direct3D or OpenGL rendering. Unless you hack it, of course - not sure if the Pro drivers have the same protection in place as the gaming ones.

 

push2drop

[Stranded_Napkin]

The OP asked if two video cards not configured in either SLI or Crossfire would help performance. This I would say would only be possible if there were other gpu intensive tasks going on while playing the game, such as rendering or playing other videos. Take my style for example. I get bored mining without music or a video, so I play videos on my second monitor. This isn't heavy on the cpu but it does add to what my gpu has to do. Considering neither monitor has freesync or g-sync, that is dependent on the gpu which kills the performance. Adding a second card to separate those tasks could help. Overall performance boost may not be worth the effort though, never tried it. Heard of it being done though.

 

As to @Pichii's comment about SLI, that is incorrect. You can pair two different gpu's. Such as if you pair a 1080 with a 1060, both will run at the specs of the lesser card. You basically neuter the better card to gain SLI capability. In the end it does you little good.

[Pichii]

On 3/20/2021 at 6:30 PM, Stranded_Napkin said:

The OP asked if two video cards not configured in either SLI or Crossfire would help performance. This I would say would only be possible if there were other gpu intensive tasks going on while playing the game, such as rendering or playing other videos. Take my style for example. I get bored mining without music or a video, so I play videos on my second monitor. This isn't heavy on the cpu but it does add to what my gpu has to do. Considering neither monitor has freesync or g-sync, that is dependent on the gpu which kills the performance. Adding a second card to separate those tasks could help. Overall performance boost may not be worth the effort though, never tried it. Heard of it being done though.

 

As to @Pichii's comment about SLI, that is incorrect. You can pair two different gpu's. Such as if you pair a 1080 with a 1060, both will run at the specs of the lesser card. You basically neuter the better card to gain SLI capability. In the end it does you little good.

So, in short it doesnt work without two identical cards because you "neuter" the other chip....
You can also stick a fork in an electrical socket and it still 'works' but not exactly the way you wanted it to eh? lol
People who run SLI and Crossfire and had problems running two chips that were not identical (mixing and matching) so, feel free to do so at your own risk. Sometimes it worked, others it didnt, others took days of configuring. *shrug* In the end, you butcher the reason you using 2 gfx cards tho.
Techie sites also said they had better performance and responsiveness with identical cards.

Edited March 23, 2021 by Pichii (see edit history)

[Naz]

I used to run 2 1080tis in sli for 7dtd, I know you're not asking about sli but what I learned from that can still apply. 

 

7dtd is massevly cpu bould as sylen has said, adding another 1080ti gave the game an on paper 100% increased performance ceiling. However in reality that only gave me an extra 25-50% increase in performance. 

 

Also that was at 4k, running stock it wouldn't even scale positively at anything below 4k. Overclocking ram, cpu, gpu and assigning 4 core affinity it could scale positively at 1440p.

 

Any type of multi gpu setup has extra cpu overhead, so depending on the power of the GPU's and your cpu it might not even give you anything, even if you could find a way to use a workstation accelerator card. 

 

Somthing that's easier to try and will actrully give you more free performance is assigning 7dtd 4 true cores, depending on how cpu bound you are it can give you a boost up to 100%, even if you have a weak gpu it would still smooth out your 0.1% & 1% low frame times. However if your gpu is really really weak it could end up not doing much of anything. But it's simple to try and costs only a couple minutes of time so I'd suggest trying that before sweating too much on an unknown endeavour. 

 

Here is a guide on how to make a shortcut to launch the game using only the cores you want. You can also try overclocking your hardware, this isn't as easy if your new but with a bit of time you can get more out of your current hardware. 

 

Both of those suggestions work and are proven to give more performance, give those a try and see if they can give you playable performance. 

[SylenThunder]

5 hours ago, Naz said:

Somthing that's easier to try and will actrully give you more free performance is assigning 7dtd 4 true cores, depending on how cpu bound you are it can give you a boost up to 100%, even if you have a weak gpu it would still smooth out your 0.1% & 1% low frame times. However if your gpu is really really weak it could end up not doing much of anything. But it's simple to try and costs only a couple minutes of time so I'd suggest trying that before sweating too much on an unknown endeavour. 

 

Here is a guide on how to make a shortcut to launch the game using only the cores you want. You can also try overclocking your hardware, this isn't as easy if your new but with a bit of time you can get more out of your current hardware. 

This is especially important when you have a CPU that has extremely weak multi-core performance, like the second generation AMD chipsets. Chips like the 2700 have awesome single-core speeds, but when they're tasked with a program that uses/requires multithreading their performance takes a nose dive. Following this tip will help to boost the performance on those chips quite a bit. You'll go from struggling to get 40FPS to 100FPS in a heartbeat if it's paired with a decent GPU.

[uncle.heavy]

It should be noted that setting core affinity breaks EAC though - at least for me in every case.

 

As a side note:

I am gaining about the same by disabling SMT.

( though it is measly, mileage would vary wildly on other systems as I am not the intended audience; the 2600 eats my 2060 card alive).

 

[Naz]

14 hours ago, uncle.heavy said:

It should be noted that setting core affinity breaks EAC though - at least for me in every case.

 

As a side note:

I am gaining about the same by disabling SMT.

( though it is measly, mileage would vary wildly on other systems as I am not the intended audience; the 2600 eats my 2060 card alive).

 

If you assigned affinity through task manager it won't work with eac, however if you do the shortcut route and set the target to the 7dtdeac exe it will work.