Will dual 550 Ti SLI work?

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JonCondiff

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I have 4 550 Ti(I know they're old, we cant afford new graphics cards, nor can our case fit a modern graphics card that has Aura.) and I'm wondering if dual SLI would be VR ready.
 
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Those GPUs, even in 4x SLI, will not meet the minimum GPU requirements of today's games as they only have 1GB VRAM. Your only hope would be to extremely turn down resolution and quality settings to run VR. It's the old classic "you wanna play, you gotta pay" scenario with PC gaming. Battlefield 1's minimum GPU requirement for example is a 2GB GTX 660.

And speaking of 4x SLI, that third and fourth GPU would see severe diminished returns in increased FPS. At best, the typical 3-way SLI only boosts FPS by 25% and the fourth GPU by a mere 10%. And that's for games that scale well with SLI...not all do.
With VR you want between 60 and 90 FPS, 90+ being ideal. I guess it depends on what games you're trying to run, but more than likely I doubt it would work well.

How much onboard RAM do the cards have? That's going to be the biggest factor I think.
 

JonCondiff

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I have 16 GB the VR tester by steam says everything is good but graphics
 


No, I mean how much RAM do you have on each card, not plugged into the motherboard. It's probably 1 or 2 GB. Either way, the RAM on each card isn't added together to have one big pool, you take the RAM of the card that has the least amount of it.
 
Those GPUs, even in 4x SLI, will not meet the minimum GPU requirements of today's games as they only have 1GB VRAM. Your only hope would be to extremely turn down resolution and quality settings to run VR. It's the old classic "you wanna play, you gotta pay" scenario with PC gaming. Battlefield 1's minimum GPU requirement for example is a 2GB GTX 660.

And speaking of 4x SLI, that third and fourth GPU would see severe diminished returns in increased FPS. At best, the typical 3-way SLI only boosts FPS by 25% and the fourth GPU by a mere 10%. And that's for games that scale well with SLI...not all do.
 
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JonCondiff

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wasn't sure if I would be able to find out what that is as I'm not home right now; but I did thanks to look at all 550 Ti at PCPartPicker.com. Unfortunately, I could only find to two of them due to me not knowing what one of them specifically looks like(It being in a BTX PC my father uses), and the other one not appearing on the site(It's says Nvidia on it). The two I did find are a Gigabyte 1GB and a Galaxy 1GB. since those two are 1GB I'm going to assume the other two are 1GB as well. I'm going to assume thats not going to work is it?
 


EVGA offered a 2GB variant, but those were pretty rare as their price was into the far superior 2GB 560 territory. I cannot remember if Gigabyte or MSI or any of the other GPU vendors offered a 2GB variant. Again, those GPUs if they are only 1GB VRAM will not meet the minimum requirements for today's games.

 


I don't think the GTX 550 Ti supports more than 2-way SLI anyway.

Plus SLI doesn't work in VR content. You need VR SLI, which is entirely different... and still has practically no support.
 
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