Can I assist a more powerful GPU with a lesser one?

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GTaero40

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Jan 29, 2017
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Hello all,
This is a question that has been pestering me for several months. Long story short, I saw a video on LinusTechTips a while back where a certain GPU's performance was boosted by adding a smaller, less powerful GPU alongside it. I currently have a 750Ti OC 4GB GIGABYTE card as my main card, but given it's age, I can feel noticeable lag in certain games I like to play from time to time. I remembered that I had an old GT 630 from a while back, and thus the idea hit me. As both cards support DirectX 12 I was wondering if there was any possible way to use the GT 630 as a "Helper" for the 750 Ti, similair to how I saw in the video. I currently have both cards installed and functioning properly, both show up in Device Manager with updated drivers. Any thought and suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks!
 
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BurgerandChips66
Games like Ashes Of The Singularity, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Civilization VI support it and a few others (Prey for example) are planned to support DX12 m-GPU in the future. (So not very many right now, but it's early days!) Scaling in some games is 100% - if you are using 2 identical GPU's. That's quite promising when compared to Crossfire or SLI. But (in theory) you can mix and match AMD with Nvidia and it 'should' work. Apparently Vulkan will support m-GPU in the future as well.

What I like about the concept is that you get more effective vram. The frame-buffer of each card only needs to contain the portion of the frame that the individual card is rendering. This is because split-frame-rendering (SFR) is utilised, whereas with...
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The_Staplergun

The_Staplergun

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Jan 30, 2017
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No. That would be SLI and they supplement through direct connection.

The one card cannot help the other, and in fact actually can take up valuable PCIe lanes and reduce the primary cards raw performance.

This might be for something like rendering or the likes, but games, no.
 
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getochkn

getochkn

Polypheme
Jul 2, 2006
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This only works in one of two cases.

First, direct x 12 games are supposed to be able to use all available GPU's. There is only 1 or 2 actual direct X 12 games, so not feasable.

Two, PhysX. This is where a second card can do Physics processing like blowing up particles and stuff and the main GPU does all the graphics.

In either case the 630 will do nothing. It will probably hamper performance as it's so slow and old and not powerful, that it just won't do anything.
 
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GTaero40

Commendable
Jan 29, 2017
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Thanks for the immediate replies! I understand what you're saying. I didn't have any high hopes for the theory, but am definitely a bit confused as to how Linus managed to pull it off by sticking a Zotac passively cooled GT 730 alongside a GTX 980 and got much better gaming benchmarks (cards may not be exact but they were similar.)
 
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BurgerandChips66

BurgerandChips66

Honorable
Jan 11, 2016
688
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Games like Ashes Of The Singularity, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Civilization VI support it and a few others (Prey for example) are planned to support DX12 m-GPU in the future. (So not very many right now, but it's early days!) Scaling in some games is 100% - if you are using 2 identical GPU's. That's quite promising when compared to Crossfire or SLI. But (in theory) you can mix and match AMD with Nvidia and it 'should' work. Apparently Vulkan will support m-GPU in the future as well.

What I like about the concept is that you get more effective vram. The frame-buffer of each card only needs to contain the portion of the frame that the individual card is rendering. This is because split-frame-rendering (SFR) is utilised, whereas with Crossfire/SLI it is usually alternate-frame-rendering (AFR) and so each frame buffer must contain the entire frame.



 
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