My experience of SLI on the GTX 1080

[Sphere]

If you are reading this thread either today, or found it on google in a search, here is my experience with SLI in Ark Survival Evolved at this time.

Now if in the future we ever get DirectX12, just maybe multi-gpu support will be enabled.

If you have SLI, or are planning to get SLI, read below for my suggested steps to take to improve your game performance and experience.

If you want to know if I recommend SLI, read my sentence below this one.
Do I recommend it for more performance? Nope. You might get a total of 0 to 10 FPS performance boost for the cost of a second graphics card. Sometimes the water fountains don't show water, and fire is somewhat laggy when it glitches out these horrible looking huge glitchy particle effects that make the fire look really stupid. Not only that, but sometimes the trees glitch on transparency around them, and look boxy around the intended transparency of the tree.
Do I recommend it for Ark Survival Evolved in virtual reality? Definitely no. Occulus Rift has it disabled in the drivers, and when using the HTC Vive, yes it will work, but only for a while until the screen freezes in place and you have to reset SteamVR to get your display to work again.

Now if you have SLI and want to improve it, here are the suggestions to follow.

Disable CPU Parking. Google about it. But what it means is, if your CPU is not being pushed enough, it parks the cores to save power, which slows down game performance. This feature when on, impacts SLI performance. Best to set the minimum performance to 100% for the CPU.

Disable High Precision Event Timer. Google about it. This feature when enabled, will count up to infinity, and queues programming events on that event timer. However if any of the event queues get skipped, say for example if the processor is too busy, you will notice things like micro-stutter in SLI for example. This feature was designed to make Aero for Windows run better, but hurts SLI users as an unintended side effect. Disabling it means that event queues are on a timer that ticks downwards, instead of going upwards, and do not get skipped if the processor is too busy. Disabling HPet will improve SLI greatly. Very useful tip for people who notice micro-stuttering a lot in SLI. To turn this feature off, you will either need to go into your UEFI at computer boot, or go to Device Manager, scroll down to System devices, then scroll down to High Precision Event Timer, and then disable it. I found disabling the driver to work, as my UEFI did not list HPet as an option to modify.

Do not set the game priority to -high, as this will cause issues with the running operations of SLI. When SLI is disabled, -high priority is perfectly fine.

Set the game to launch with -USEALLAVAILABLECORES.

For the GTX 1080, you will still have issues with bases. I find for the 1080, setting world tile buffers to medium is descent for huge bases in Ark Survival Evolved.

There are many posts I have seen on steam forums, talking about how setting anti-aliasing to epic, can result in crashing when running under SLI. High is the preferred setting, as it is better than crashing. In my own experience, epic Anti-Aliasing did cause crashing.

Play with at least 16 Gigs of RAM. And then you will need to set the virtual ram in your computer on a SSD to 3 times the size of your RAM, which for 16 GB, would be 48. Setting it to 40 is fine, but 48 is recommended. If you do not do this, and I have verified it, SLI uses gigabytes of resources in cache, and if you do not set it high enough, the game will crash, and on a lot of occasions will give the excuse of "out of memory".

Turn Shader Caching off in Nvidia. I found that with it on, it did cause the game to pause and wait while the SSD handed the computer information about Shader Caching. The SSD is already busy with 48 GB of virtual memory and the game files, why give it Shader Caching to deal with as well? If you are rolling with a descent computer, you won't need Shader Caching on anyways.

Post processing can be epic, but otherwise high will help.

A resolution of 1080p is ideal for this game, even when rolling with a GTX 1080. Although I have done DSR 1440p, which looks amazing on a HTC Vive, however in a massive base it hurts performance. Too bad SLI eventually causes the Vive to freeze up.

This is a suggestion that I found helps to make the game feel more fluid in regards to FPS frame time. Set Vertical Sync Smooth AFR behavior to On, Vertical Sync Tear Control to Adaptive, and Vertical Sync must be forced on. This helps in an amazing way to make huge bases less laggy, and helps more so for SLI users. You can set V-Sync on in Nvidia, but having Nvidia Inspector helps too.

In Nvidia, make sure triple buffering is off. This is a suggestion I have seen several times posted for this game. I have it set to off, and am enjoying Ark just fine.

Setting the power management of the graphics card in Nvidia to maximum performance is probably common sense.

The other settings in the game options, you can max out. I find it runs just fine this way. You can set General and Terrain Shadows to High, but I prefer Epic.

 

If you are rolling with SLI, then by all means try these settings. Did it cost you anything to try?

If you are looking to buy into SLI to play this game, my recommendation at this time of posting, do not do it, it's a waste of money.
If you are going to buy into SLI, do it for other reasons as well. This game is not everything, and thus don't make your purchase decisions based entirely on this game. 1 single GTX 1080 is just fine in my honest opinion. Buying one of these and putting everything to max is possible. However I also suggest for a single GPU, turn the world tile buffers to medium, as that does help with huge bases.

Feel free to discuss below, or tell us all if this worked for you.

 

[iiNNeX]

I am about to try these settings out on my 1080 SLI PC as well. Been getting the fire particle effect bugs with SLI enabled and just generally not much of a performance boost even though my cards run at 2100mhz together

 

Thank you for the write up!

[Chris]

It's interesting you are having these issues with your 1080's in SLI. I am running my Titan XPs in SLI without adjusting anything. Everything on EPIC and at 1440p without the issues you are describing (I shoot all the trailers on live builds with this setup) and I certainly get at least a 40% FPS drop when disabling SLI.

I'd be interested to know your card type and a Precision X overlay screenshot of GPU usage etc for each card.

Thanks

[Lewiatan]

So, does 1080 SLI allow to run this game in 60 fps in every situation? It is so badly optimised that the most powerful single GPU Pascal Titan X cannot run it in above 60 fps.

I use I7 6700k 4.0Ghz, MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X and 32 GB RAM and it really irrtates me that over 2200 euro worth PC cannot run this game on epic above 40 fps in 1080p resolution (The Island map). I usually get 32 to 40 fps.

[iiNNeX]

On 16/02/2017 at 6:42 AM, Casanova said:

It's interesting you are having these issues with your 1080's in SLI. I am running my Titan XPs in SLI without adjusting anything. Everything on EPIC and at 1440p without the issues you are describing (I shoot all the trailers on live builds with this setup) and I certainly get at least a 40% FPS drop when disabling SLI.

I'd be interested to know your card type and a Precision X overlay screenshot of GPU usage etc for each card.

Thanks

You are the first person I hear that has said that. 99% of what you find online is people complaining about the terrible sli optimisation and just the game's performance on high end gpu's in general being really bad. Both of my cards get good usage, around 70-85% but FPS is just as bad as single GPU. I will try the fixes above and see if it helps.

On 16/02/2017 at 10:19 AM, Lewiatan said:

So, does 1080 SLI allow to run this game in 60 fps in every situation? It is so badly optimised that the most powerful single GPU Pascal Titan X cannot run it in above 60 fps.

I use I7 6700k 4.0Ghz, MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X and 32 GB RAM and it really irrtates me that over 2200 euro worth PC cannot run this game on epic above 40 fps in 1080p resolution (The Island map). I usually get 32 to 40 fps.

No it does not, especially at 1440p. At 1080p with a 1080 you should be able to get 60 by disabling some of the advanced features but yeah you are right you cannot max every single setting  and get it (game's fault not your hardware).

[Lewiatan]

15 hours ago, iiNNeX said:

No it does not, especially at 1440p. At 1080p with a 1080 you should be able to get 60 by disabling some of the advanced features but yeah you are right you cannot max every single setting  and get it (game's fault not your hardware).

I think The Island map is done badly in general. I wonder how the are going to optimize it before release without making a lot players angry by removing their things accidentally. With the same epic settings I get 50-70 fps on The Center.

It suprises me devs have to use Titan cards in SLI to have the best performance...

[Sphere]

Nvidia refused to sell Titan X Pascal cards to Australia at the time of my 1080 SLI purchase.

Ah yeah,  I decided to upgrade to 32 gigs of ram. It did help. 16 gig is the minimum for SLI imho.

[Sphere]

I tried this game again in the Vive. SLI works now in Virtual Desktop and VorpX with the HTC Vive. If only this game would naturally support the HTC Vive, even if it's keyboard and mouse. But you know, reasons.