Frontier, please continue to support SLI in Odyssey as well.

[WR3ND]

In addition to Elite: Dangerous earlier that year, I bought Odyssey along with the rest of the full game back in 2015 as part of the LEP, back when SLI was more prevalent and actively supported. SLI has continued to work very well for me up throughout Horizons and Beyond, but with the changes to the graphics in Odyssey, it seems to have been forgotten or overlooked by Frontier.

I understand Frontier are probably facing a number of challenges optimizing the performance of Odyssey, but for me at least, and presumably a handful of others, SLI support would be great to see.

As mentioned, SLI works great for me in Horizons where I'm getting around 230~260 FPS in the main menu hangar (outside of testing I usually use vsync and enjoy the ample overhead for multitasking, cool running, and of course smooth frames without tearing). Odyssey on the other hand runs comparatively quite poorly at about 30~35 FPS in the main menu hangar, having roughly one-seventh to one-ninth the performance potential of Horizons.

Here are a couple pics showing relative performance along with CPU and GPU loads. I'm using two Titan Black cards each with 6GB GDDR5 memory, an i7-3930K at 4.2GHz, 64GB quad-channel DDR3 1600MHz RAM, Windows 7 Pro SP1, and a 4TB Samsung 860 Pro SSD as the main system and programs drive. I use the Ultra game preset minus the blur and depth of field type effects which I don't particularly care for, and I lower the bloom effect as well.

↓ For quick comparison, see FPS in top left corner.

Spoiler

SLI optimization is probably only one of several factors causing this discrepancy in performance, but it is likely a significant one.

Thanks.

 

[Sysmon]

I support this message! Shortly after the Alpha testing opened up in 2014 I got an SLI system running, first with two GeForce 980TI cards, later two 1070 cards instead. SLI worked well all the way up to Beyond, but there has been no real use of the second card in Odyssey. As @WR3ND shows above, the CPU is taking a nap in Odyssey. That my GPU1 is napping could be due to it being dedicated to PhysX.

It would be nice to see SLI support again, as part of the performance upgrades underway for Odyssey.

S

 

[WR3ND]

I'm not sure if technically it not working well would be considered a bug or not, since presumably it was implemented intentionally in the game initially, and Odyssey still using it being a holdover from that. I don't know how SLI support is handled on the developer side of things in general.

 

[GroG79]

Nvidia totally ditched SLI and is pointing to the developers to fix it for the games they create. On top of this it is a proprietary solution. There is no synergy with console players and neither with single nvidia card users. Fdev is more likely to implement dlss than sli.

So I do not see any motivation for any game studio to support SLI (again). We moved on. There is no need for SLI

 

[WR3ND]

SLI is already implemented for the game. The need in support is for the game to continue to run well where it has run well on the hardware the game was made and bought for. See the performance comparisons in my first post. These are both current, not from 6 years ago. The advantage of SLI when working well here, as it does currently in Horizons, is obvious.

 

[Cosmik_Debris]

Tbh, SLI is pretty.. unusual these days. It seemed to me right from the outset to be a bad idea for anything other than 'money is no object' bleeding edge systems with 2 of the best GFX cards on the market (which looks like what you went for, tbh), because using two lower end cards always worked out way more expensive for a given performance level than 1 better card.

I know it sucks for your existing system, but, given the number of issues with Odyssey and performance, it seems like its not a great use of dev time to work on SLI support when only a minute fraction of people run SLI systems.

 

[WR3ND]

It's very strange though. Odyssey somehow performs exceptionally poorly with SLI, like the frame rates are being not just bottlenecked but pushed down lower somehow by the game itself, running much worse than it otherwise should.

Some people seem to like criticizing SLI, sometimes even for legitimate reasons, but that's largely irrelevant here. The game supports SLI insofar as it being implemented, and with graphics cards and subsequent corresponding drivers that are recommended by Frontier to their customers, including those buying Odyssey. As I see it the issue is a matter of Frontier continuing support for their game and customers. Going from using existing hardware well to crippling the performance of your game for the customers who paid for it and use it on that existing hardware is an error that should be corrected. Even if it somewhat understandably isn't a top priority with SLI being as niche as it is, it should still be on the to-do-and-get-done list.

The comparative performance is so bad that it's likely due to a bug of some sort, not a limitation of the hardware or SLI itself. To help put things in perspective, if Odyssey were twice as demanding as Horizons: Beyond (seems more than a bit excessive for a game expansion, but let's go with it anyway), it would still perform more than 3 times better than what it actually does for me with its implementation. Something is definitely messed up with the game.

 

[WR3ND]

Just an update to mention that with some further testing with my computer, performance in Odyssey is actually better with SLI disabled, so definitely some optimization issues with Odyssey's implementation and use of SLI that hopefully Frontier will be able to address and resolve eventually. Naturally, I much prefer using SLI and the resources available on my computer, which Horizons Beyond still does a great job of, so I am continuing to play that instead.