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

[Pichii]

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.

 

[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]

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]

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. 

 

[uncle.heavy]

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. 

I had set the shortcut for 7daystodie.exe - was actually not aware of the eac binary. 
But better to have it stated here for all so they do not fail on the same route - or better even, banning themselves in the process.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

I once read somewhere that it is possible to use a 2nd graphicscard (non-sli) as accelerator. But the software has to support this, and it doesn't really scale, because it just can offload certain kinds of workload to the second gpu. Iirc in that case i read about only PhysX calculations where handed to the second gpu.

Even if 7d2d (or unity out of the box) would be able to use the second GPU for something in that way, i'd still not expect a reasonable performance increase.

 

[Naz]

I had set the shortcut for 7daystodie.exe - was actually not aware of the eac binary. 
But better to have it stated here for all so they do not fail on the same route - or better even, banning themselves in the process.

I've been using the eac affinity shortcut for a long time never been banned. 

 

[uncle.heavy]

I was explicitly mentioning the "7daystodie.exe" shortcut. Had overlooked the ...EAC.exe.

But I think we have that clarified now.

 

[SylenThunder]

I once read somewhere that it is possible to use a 2nd graphicscard (non-sli) as accelerator. But the software has to support this, and it doesn't really scale, because it just can offload certain kinds of workload to the second gpu. Iirc in that case i read about only PhysX calculations where handed to the second gpu.

Even if 7d2d (or unity out of the box) would be able to use the second GPU for something in that way, i'd still not expect a reasonable performance increase.

I have done this, but you end up losing some CPU performance to the software that's managing the workloads. I have done this with a pair of 1060's, and the results were negligible. (And to be fair, it's the only way to team a pair of 1060's together since they have no SLI bridge.)

 

[Stranded_Napkin]

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.

Wrong, it does work. You are arguing by changing the definition of "works". Yes, the system will run. Yes, the system will utilize SLI. Yes, it will perform better than a single slower card. It may or may not perform better than the better card alone as that entirely depends on the cards. There are definitely poorly made cards that would benefit from offloading some of that workload. It is extremely unlikely that it would work better than the one better card, but you cannot assume that without stating the cards. Is it worth it? Not at all, cost to performance isn't there. I will give you that. By most, and sometimes all, of the definitions of "works" it absolutely does work. Just because you don't see significant performance gains, does not mean something does not work. It just doesn't meet your needs. Those are two very different things.