Nvidia GTX 590, only one GPU being used... ?

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Alright, well I was playing red faction: ARmageddon earlier and i had the Nvidia inspector GPU monitor open, when i realized that only one of my GPUs was being used, hence the bad performance. This alarmed me, as my $700 graphics card is only being used to half its potential in this game!
I hear online that SLI (the GTX 590 is a dual-GPU graphics card) can be enabled for games that do not support it, using some sort of downloadable software... not sure if this is true or not, but it seems to come up pretty often...

Can somebody please link me to a reliable program that will let me enable SLI for my games that do not support it, and provide some kind of description or instructions as to how to go about doing this? I really want to get my money's worth on this gaming computer, and this kind of performance in Red Faction: Armageddon is a little shameful 🙁
 
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Mousemonkey

If you click the 'Add' button you can browse for the .exe manually and add it that way, I can't recall off of the top of my head which is which but the two alternates are AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) where on frame is rendered by one card and the next by the other and so on, and SFR (Split Frame Rendering) where one card renders the top half of the screen whilst the other...
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How were you monitoring the GPU activity while you were gaming? Do you have two monitors, or did you monitor it while in windowed mode, or did you check the results by alt tabbing out and look at a log?

One of those methods will result in cutting out SLI and invalidates the results, which means there may not be a problem.
 
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I'm running it in a window, and i have the GPU monitor open right next to it, so i can see it.

I have one 1920x1200 monitor, but the window was running at 1680x1050.
any idea what the problem could be? maybe i don't have SLI set up properly?
Is there any way to check the status of my SLI?

Really, i don't know what to do.. 🙁
 
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Wow, that's useful to know.. man i guess i'll keep it fullscreened next time

But, over half the games on the market today do not support SLI, and i still think that there is some kind of method to enable SLI for games that do not support it, am i correct? Something to do with SLI profiling or something like that (not sure)?

P.S. Thanks for your help, guys :)
 
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Depends on what you consider half the market. If you are looking at Steam, with games up to 10 years old still on it, you may be somewhat closer to right, but if you look at games released in the last 2-3 years, most support SLI/Crossfire.
 
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Thank you for your help amirp and bystander :)

Amirp, my GTX 590 is by ASUS, not EVGA, can i still use the patch?



Bystander, Of the games i've played so far, only just cause 2, crysis 2, EVE online, and Homefront seem to use SLI properly. I also ran Prototype, Red faction: Guerilla, Red Faction: Armageddon, and a number of other games that don't seem to support it, and i want to try running Company of Heroes soon on this computer... do you think/know if that game supports SLI? if it doesn't, i guess there is no point in buying it ):
 
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Most of the fps games that I've played in the last six years or so have supported SLi and if they don't it can be forced via the Nvidia control panel.
 
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Of the games that I run into that do not support SLI or Crossfire, they usually have been RTS's. It appears a fair amount of the games you are having troubles with are RTS's.
 
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This. Could you explain how exactly i could go about "forcing" a game to support SLI?
 
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I remember there used to be an option under the individual game profiles that let you attempt to force SLI. It usually didn't work for me, however, there was an option to force some sort of hybrid SLI that would allow the 2nd card to apply AA levels and the 1st card would render. I forget the exact name of the option.
 
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Referring to the EVGA patch, I dont think there should be any reason you wont be able to use the patch, give it a try. They just add profiles in the NVIDIA control panel which is the same regardless of your GPU brand.
 
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Thanks so much for your help mousemonkey, a few questions though regarding this method of "forcing" sli...

I unchecked "show only programs that are found on this computer" and could not find the game i am trying to enable SLI for, does that mean that i cannot use SLI to run the game?

Also, what is the difference between alternate frame rendering 1 and 2?
 
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If you click the 'Add' button you can browse for the .exe manually and add it that way, I can't recall off of the top of my head which is which but the two alternates are AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) where on frame is rendered by one card and the next by the other and so on, and SFR (Split Frame Rendering) where one card renders the top half of the screen whilst the other card renders the bottom half.
 
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