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Issues, Workarounds & Localization

 
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Win 7 or Win 8? SLI or not?
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hydraSlav
Synergy Evolved
#1 - 2014-01-09 16:15:02 UTC
Not sure if this is the correct forum... but here it goes. My 10yo computer died completely. Time for a new one:

So i've got a few questions. Keep in mind that i need to run 2 clients on 2 monitors at the same time.

- Should I stick with Win7 (i've had this before), or go for Win8? Are there any problems with Win8 and EvE, performance-wise, stability-wise.

- Does EvE support SLI? Will a single client run better with SLI enabled?
- When running 2 clients on 2 monitors, is it better to dedicate 1 card to each monitor/client, or just have system-wide SLI? (I really don't know much about this topic)

- 8gb or 16gb RAM? No video editing requirement.

Thank you all
Rroff
Antagonistic Tendencies
#2 - 2014-01-09 22:08:41 UTC  |  Edited by: Rroff
SLI isn't really needed for eve - any half decent modern GPU can run multiple clients with no real performance issues. There are however some merits to having 1 GPU for one client and 1 GPU for another client running on different monitors. Overall you'd be better off going for a decent single GPU like a GTX780 or R9 290 than messing about with SLI IMO.

8GB is fine however if you are running 4+ clients you can definitely make use of 16GB (well atleast more than 8). But for only 2 clients more than 8GB is wasted on Eve.

From what I've seen so far it doesn't make much odds in regard to Eve if your on Windows 7 or 8 the only thing that might be worth a consideration here is that multi monitor in windows 8 has some niggles that don't exist in 7 especially in regard to things like DPI scaling if you need it.
Dante Chusuk
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#3 - 2014-01-10 09:52:57 UTC
While I run SLI I have a tendency to agree that it's not 100% necessary for Eve unlike other games. Also the "break even" points seem to be around 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200 on some older monitors) for dual card (or dual GPU like the GTX590 for example) and 2560x1600 for triple card though again as GPUs improve these are consistently moving targets.

Also you run the risk (like we had with Rubicon) of a game updating it's engine to a newer version of DirectX and Nvidia's (or AMD's) drivers being a step behind and SLI (or Crossfire) only works in the older version of the engine (presuming it's still available) until the drivers are updated.

With multi-graphics card solutions it's another item to potentially go wrong ...

RAM amounts I'd agree with, I run 16GB of RAM and with 4 clients running plus background items that usually reaches 50-60% capacity. I occassionally get a client using more than 1GB of RAM but most of the time even undocked they use 600MB of RAM. That said I also do photo editing and that's when the RAM mainly gets loaded for me.

Finally with CPUs if you are running only two clients (and don't do stuff like video or photo editing) the most you'll want is likely a quad core (or an AMD X3 if they are still about and you don't want Intel). I've got an AMD X6 and again max utilisation is when doing photo editing not gaming. Even the theoretically "use as many cores as possible" X Rebirth only uses 4 cores and even then not fully.