Why No SLI Support?

[digitaljones]

Granted running 2 Nvidia 8800GTS may seem like overkill but not when on a 30 inch LCD at 2560x1600. This seems very lazy to me. Would it be so hard to add support for SLI?

[PhoenixReborn]

Hmm, How well does the game run for you on one of those?

[digitaljones]

Running at 2560x1600 with a settings maxed and of course just one 8800gts 640mb I get around 36FPS. This is with 2gig of RAM on a Core26600 overclocked to 3.0ghz. Game runs good; just hate not utilizing a $400 video.

[Naki]

Curious, what exactly happens when you try to run the game using SLI - does it exit with an error message, crashes or something else?

[MistWeaver]

Running at 2560x1600 with a settings maxed and of course just one 8800gts 640mb I get around 36FPS. This is with 2gig of RAM on a Core26600 overclocked to 3.0ghz. Game runs good; just hate not utilizing a $400 video.

Hate buying such video cards when you have no use for them.

[digitaljones]

No it doesn't crash or anything. It just doesn't use the second video card. I can tell by checking frame rate when SLI is disabled or enabled. The frame rates stay the same. Also the temperature on the second video card never increases. Oh well, it still runs decent on one 8800GTS at 2560x1600.

[jeff]

I am going to play devil’s (ok UBI/Nival, same thing) advocate, while I can see why you want this support, from a company standpoint what does that add to a turn-based strategy game experience. A shooter, MMORPG or even a sports game ok, but the number of systems out there playing H-V with that capability it really does not seem worth the investment, no matter how small.

[Sikon]

What the heck is SLI?

[Naki]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface

[Alamar]

The video engine for the game isn't even particularly well optimized for one card systsms. I would have been astonished if SLI would have yielded good results.

Furthermore I'd be surprised if UBI/Nival made the investment to go back and fix something very few fans are complainaing about. There's just not a lot of short-term economic incentive to do so ....

[Naki]

OK I read up a bit on SLI, and maybe you CAN get the game to use it.

NVidia's site says that their drivers have "SLI presets" for most popular games (I assume they didn't think Heroes V is popular ), but SLI can be enabled for any game by creating a SLI profile for it. So try doing that, and tell us if it works or not.
Link: http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_appprofile.html

By the way, what brand are your 8800GTS cards? Also, what program are you using to measure the temperatures of the two cards?

[Chai26]

i think TBS games are less "technical" than shooters or more graphic intensive games. So i fear SLI wont really affect its performance greatly

[Naki]

Heroes V uses a full-blown 3D engine.
So you ~should~ get at least 50% (or in perfect case, 100%) improvement in FPS (frames per second).
Anyway, it is useless to discuss this without trying it - so if someone has a SLI setup, please try it and tell us what happens...

[Naki]

OK, I got a SLI setup now (2 x GF8600GTs with 256 MB of videoRAM each).

The FPS I got from a simple test (Replay Dialog 1 from Options) at 1280x1024, all settings maxed out, were the following:
No SLI: 51.61 FPS
SLI (manually turned on for Heroes V): 84.72 FPS (64% increase)
Pretty good increase!

Now the bad news: the game obviously doesn't like SLI, and there are artifacts when it is turned on, inlcuding some ASCII tables appearing and parts of screen blinking...

[kingu]

why not have 1 good gtx/ultra instead of a gts in sli? plus soon 9800 will come which pretty much renders gts sli pointless