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MSTS and SLI

Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 4:56 pm
by Breedlings
Has anyone had any experience of profiles for setting up MSTS to take advantage of graphics cards linked via SLI?

Alex

Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 2:55 am
by mousepound64
What exactly is SLI? I've never heard of it. :o

Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 8:18 am
by jbilton
mousepound64 wrote:What exactly is SLI? I've never heard of it. :o
A quick google search

http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_learn.html

Cheers
Jon

Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 10:19 am
by lateagain
Didn't I read that Otto's new box has twin graphics cards?

Geoff

Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 10:56 am
by decapod
From what I know about the MSTS graphics engine, you would be better off with a faster CPU.
MSTS does a lot of graphics processing first, before passing it to the video card.

HOWEVER - for future sims, SLI would give more of an improvement.

Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 2:47 pm
by Breedlings
As expected - future proofed pc but MSTS just can't take advantage of the benefits.

Good job it was bought with the forthcoming sims in mind :P

Lets

Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 3:38 pm
by 45002
And dont forget the Spin speed of your Hard drives 7,200 rpm will slow msts

what ever GC in your pc

MARTIN :D

Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 8:18 pm
by BobLatimer
Check this out.
http://www.alienware.com/product_detail ... KU-DEFAULT

I'll bet it will run even MSTS smoothly.

Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 8:39 pm
by johncas
Sure will

Posted: Sat May 20, 2006 5:41 am
by GreatEastern
Comment about SLI
I am running SLI with two Geforce 6800 Ultras. As far as MSTS is concerned SLI makes very little difference. This is because, due to the of the age of the software, it makes very little use of modern graphics cards. In fact the best way if improving frame rates is to use a fast CPU.
Even so with the new train simulator from KUJU, it should make a lot of difference use SLI. This is because with most recent graphic intensive software you get almost twice the frame rate with SLI over a single graphics card.

Posted: Sat May 20, 2006 5:52 am
by GreatEastern
Sorry an extra comment, I agree with 45002 about hard drives. A slow hard drive can also have detrimental effects on MSTS, particularly routes with a lot of detail. In fact the best to go is two SATA hard drives in RAID 0.
SATA are serial hard drives instead of the convential hard drives. Serial hard drives tranfers data at a high rate than the old parallel drives. Also RAID 0 saves half the material to one drive and the other half to the other, thereby almost double the transfer rate.
Also if you are considering SLI then you will have a motherboard capable of supporting dual matched RAMs which also speed up MSTS.