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

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BlackhawkUH60E

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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.

 
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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.

 
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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.

 
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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.  :)

 
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

 
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

 
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.

 
@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.

 
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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.

 
@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.

 
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.
Click to expand...


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

 
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.
Click to expand...
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.

 
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@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 :D

@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 ;)

 
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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.
Click to expand...
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 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
Click to expand...


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

 
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.

 
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