View Full Version : Faster with SLI?


Bo Sundvall
April 19th, 2011, 01:41 AM
Hi

I've just built a new PC from scratch and installed a Zotac GTX470 which, together with PPro Mercury playback engine, produce remarkable performance from my point of view. What I wounder about now is if I will get even more performace if I buy another GTX470 and install the grahic cards as SLI-devices? Anyone have an oppinion about this?


Regards,

/Bo

Roger Averdahl
April 19th, 2011, 03:02 AM
CS5 do not support SLI and nor will CS5.5, so SLI wont give any performance gain when using GPU Acceleration.

Ann Bens
April 19th, 2011, 03:02 AM
Premiere does not support SLI.

Roger beat me to it, he's fast :-)

Bo Sundvall
April 19th, 2011, 05:14 AM
OK, better to spend the money on other things!

Thanks for the info!


Regards,

/Bo

Roger Averdahl
April 19th, 2011, 09:01 AM
OK, better to spend the money on other things!
Yes, make sure to have plenty of RAM. Aim for 12GB as a minimum.

Randall Leong
April 19th, 2011, 11:40 AM
Yes, make sure to have plenty of RAM. Aim for 12GB as a minimum.

Actually, even 12GB isn't quite enough for optimal performance in CS5: Testing using Harm Millaard's and Bill Gehrke's PPBM5 benchmark tests showed that the addition of even 2GB (making the total 14GB) improved performance significantly compared to the 12GB base configuration.

And as all of the repliers have noted, Premiere supports only one GPU. The second card is not used at all when running Premiere. What's more, if the single card contains two GPUs (such as the GTX 590 card that's actually two GPUs in a single package), only one of the GPUs is used at all, leaving half of the GTX 590 unused.

Roger Averdahl
April 19th, 2011, 12:45 PM
Actually, even 12GB isn't quite enough for optimal performance in CS5:
Thats why i wrote minimum and not optimal. :)

Tom Miller
April 19th, 2011, 01:57 PM
i have a GTX 570 haven't worked on any big projects yet but so far its a nice card

Bo Sundvall
April 20th, 2011, 02:01 AM
Hi

Randall, the test you are reffering to, is that somewhere here on dvinfo or is it on an other web site? I now have 8GB memory installed on the new machine but thinking of installing 8GB more, total 16GB. If a performace improvement is gained with that amount of memory it will be real nice. It would be interresting to se some test verifying that more than 12GB improves performance. :-)

Regards,

/Bo

Tom Miller
April 20th, 2011, 07:12 AM
in the same boat is you i have 8gb and just ordered 8gb more so we will see what happens...

Randall Leong
April 20th, 2011, 09:24 AM
Hi

Randall, the test you are reffering to, is that somewhere here on dvinfo or is it on an other web site? I now have 8GB memory installed on the new machine but thinking of installing 8GB more, total 16GB. If a performace improvement is gained with that amount of memory it will be real nice. It would be interresting to se some test verifying that more than 12GB improves performance. :-)

Regards,

/Bo

Look at the results list at ppbm5.com (http://ppbm5.com). Click on the link to the results list, and look for two stock-speed entries starting with "Randall's Steamer" - specifically the 247-second and the 297-second results. You'll find that my 12GB configuration got a result of 297 seconds while that same system with 16GB got 247 seconds. (Specifically, the MPEG-2 DVD score improved from 93 seconds with 12GB to 43 seconds with 16GB.) The same CPU (i7-950 @ 3.06 GHz) and GPU (GTX 470) were used in both systems.