You may think that the only way to improve your frame rate is to get a new graphics card, but did you know that you can actually disable SLI for certain games In this blog post, we will show you how to do just that.
SLI mode
Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a brand name for a multi-GPU technology developed by Nvidia for linking two or more video cards together to produce a single output. SLI is a parallel processing algorithm for computer graphics, meant to increase the available processing power.
SLI allows you to use two or more graphics cards to improve your frame rate, but there may be some games that don’t perform well with SLI enabled. In these cases, you can disable SLI and see if it improves your frame rate.
To disable SLI for a certain game, open the Nvidia Control Panel and click on “Manage 3D Settings”. You should see a list of all the games that you have installed on your computer. To disable SLI for a certain game, find the game in the list and change the “SLI” setting to “OFF”.
You can also disable SLI by right-clicking on the game in your Steam library and selecting “perties”. Select the “Graphics” tab and click on “Set Launch Options”. Type in “sli=off” (without the quotes) and save your changes.
Set SLI configuration
If you get to step two in the previous section, but don’t see a configure SLI option, it’s likely that there is an issue with video card configuration. The following suggestions are to help clear up these issues.
- Make sure your video cards are properly seated and that the SLI bridge is installed correctly.
- Sometimes, swapping the slots your cards sit in does the trick.
- Verify that Windows Device Manager is showing two identical graphics cards in the Display Adapters section.
- Ensure that SLI is enabled in your BIOS settings.
- If you have an older motherboard, you may need to configure your jumpers to enable SLI. Consult you motherboard manufacturer’s manual for instructions.
- Make sure you have an adequate power supply.
- Get the latest drivers for you BIOS and video card.
- One of your graphics cards may not be functional. Try installing them one at a time to make sure they both work.
SLI Force Enabling AFR
- Open the NVIDIA Control Panel from your task tray, then navigate to Manage 3D Settings.
- Click on the Program Settings tab, then under Select a program to cumstomize use the drop-down to select a program to add.
- Next to the option for SLI Rendering Mode, you can select Force Alternate Frame Rendering.
SLI good for?
SLI technically stands for Scalable Link Interface. It is the term used by graphics card company Nvidia to describe the way it connects multiple GPUs. The technology is a form of parallel processing that makes it possible for up to four Nvidia GPUs work together to render a game at extremely high frame-rates.
SLI Worth
SLI can be worth it to one extreme gamer, and a waste of time and effort for another. In some games you’d even seen worse performance with SLI mode enabled, even in games with official support, in which case you’d want to disable SLI for that game.
Using two (or more) video cards in tandem—known as “SLI” for NVIDIA cards and “Crossfire” for AMD cards—can get you better performance, sometimes even for less money than you’d spend on a comparable single card solution. However, whether it’s worth it is another story. Here’s what you need to know.
Enable SLI in BIOS
- Right-click anywhere on your desktop and select NVIDIA Control Panel from the dropdown list or click the NVIDIA icon in the Systray.
2. Once you’ve opened the NVIDIA Control Panel, click the Set SLI configuration link under the 3D settings menu.
NIVIDIA Inspector
NVIDIA Inspector is a utility to read all GPU relevant data from the NVIDIA driver. It also supports overclocking and changing driver settings, for example to enable SLI for unsupported games. Also included is monitoring of GPU parameters like clocks, temperature and fan speed.
