Game Industry and SLI Issues

How-to fix The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt SLI issues

Steve Smith talks about SLI, the game industry, and the lack of respect from game publishers towards the PC gamer, and higher end gaming rigs.

Episode #6-31 released on April 18, 2016

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Video games are what pushed computer technology to be faster, better, more efficient, and now, for graphics, more realistic. Computers are so different from when I was a kid, that the difference between my original personal computer I had in my bed room, and the computers I have now, are night and day. Yet, I gamed on the old computer, and I still game on these ones. Gaming for me improves linear logical processing of tasks, from problem to solution. That is what a lot of my games are. You have an issue, you have to solve them, and that is it.

Now, what drives me and other enthusiasts up the wall is SLI compatibility, and implementation. Gamers are the ones that pay for a lot of the current technology, we fill our computers with graphics cards, ram, fast processors, SSDs, HDDs, beast power supplies, and more. We buy high end keyboards, mice, controllers, screens, cables, etc. Then we get spit on by defective games, with crippled launch titles, and sometimes no support for SLI, or horrible implementation at that. This is my experience with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Now, while the game works fine with a single graphics card, I, like many others, have two graphics cards, some users having up to 4 graphics card, all in SLI. SLI is supposed to improve gameplay, make graphics run smoother, increase frames per second, even look better. When buying a second, or more graphics card, we expect a doubling in scaling for two graphics, tripling for three graphics cards, even quadrupling with 4 graphics cards. SLI is technically capable of this, and while we will accept a margin of error, due to the many differences between builds, what we all hate is piss poor implementation altogether.

Triple A game titles have millions of dollars of budget, but all the focus is set on consoles. Consoles currently can't even compete with computers, as they were already lagging behind computers when they came out. And, worst, many of the games are developed on computers anyway. Which makes many of us wonder, why are these companies going out of their way to create framerate locked games, with little to no support for SLI. Well, while today's solution may not always help for all game titles, if someone out there is willing enough, they could potentially figure out which SLI profile solution works best for games with no support, or bad SLI implementations.

The tool I will be using to demonstrate a possible fix for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt SLI issue is called NVidia Inspector. You will be able to see long duration examples of Non-SLI, Default Developer engineered SLI, and a possible fix SLI issues in the game by watching my own Gamestream, which happens to be the reason for this rant. My first streaming of the game I had a few performance issues, odd because I don't run a consumer machine with recommended specs, I run a computer designed to edit video, and render results fairly live. I have more ram, space, processor power, and graphics power than the game requires to play smoothly at the initial settings I had it at. Then I activated the SLI in my computer, turned off because I was streaming Batman: Arkham Knight, previously, and I presumed the game after many months should have had SLI issues resolved, but the game play, even on low, was affecting the performance of the webcam, which I take to be odd. It took less than 5 seconds to figure out on Google that I am not the only one. There are, also, a few videos explaining how to do this, one which I will link to. This guy has the shortest but to the point solution for the game. Definitely worth a look at less than 20 seconds.

As a note, after changing the SLI profile, the game, stream, and web cam all performed at a better rate, proving that the original SLI profile is rubbish, and the profile used to aid the game actually performs better than one made for the game. This proves that developers don't necessarily pay attention to SLI profiles If other profiles do a better job.

You can acquire the NVidia Inspector application at http://www.guru3d.com/files_details/nvidia_inspector_download.html.

For the instructions on how to correct your SLI issues with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dX8iP5u7aY.

And, if you find other fixes for other games, please contact me directly and I will post them to this page, as well.

Profile used in NVidia Inspector for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is 0x0A0040F5 - (Assassin's Creed: Rogue, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (SP), Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (MP), Grand Theft Auto V, Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry)

Host : Steve Smith | Music : Jonny Lee Hart | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Productions

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