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Is RAGE a canary in the coal mine for SLI/CrossFire?

S

stahlhart

Super Moderator Graphics Cards
Just wondering if this game is an outlier, or if there will be a trend in engine development down the road that favors single GPU setups (steering consumers towards mores powerful, pricier flagship cards)?
 
stahlhart said:
Just wondering if this game is an outlier, or if there will be a trend in engine development down the road that favors single GPU setups (steering consumers towards mores powerful, pricier flagship cards)?
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I would say there is a trend for developers to develop to the largest audience which will yield the largest profit. Currently that audience is consoles. Thankfully console titles can be ported to the PC. If this were not the case even a single flagship card would be worthless. It is what it is. The glory days are behind us.
 
lavaheadache said:
huh ? I thought rage wasn't very hard on video cards.
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True, but my understanding is that its GPU transcoding option really only works with a single card. And if what I've been reading here about a compressed texture upgrade for the game comes to fruition, at 1Gb of VRAM I'm not really going to be able to run the tweaks that will push it to its maximum potential.

Will there be less of an emphasis on raw processing power and more on added onboard memory? Are we leaving behind the days of raw numeric performance benchmarks in favor of something more qualitative, say, how consistently one card holds 60 frames per second versus another?
 
stahlhart said:
Just wondering if this game is an outlier, or if there will be a trend in engine development down the road that favors single GPU setups (steering consumers towards mores powerful, pricier flagship cards)?
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Canary in a coal mine? How is this game a warning to those with SLI/Crossfire?
 
I don't find Rage as mind-blowing as everyone hypes it up to be. There are games with much better graphics IMO as well.
 
I read something that said multi-gpu is not going to work until iD does some work on their end. Not sure if that is correct or not.

I don't think you need multi-gpu for this game, I can run it @ 2560x1600 with 8XAA and get a steady 60fps using a single 480.
 
MagnusTheBrewer said:
No, it's just poorly coded, much like Crysis. <runs and hides>
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umad.gif
 
No it doesn't work with crossfire but asking for crossfire support in this game is silly. It only uses about 30% of a single 5800 card with anti aliasing at 60fps. And it looks fantastic as well.
 
WMD said:
No it doesn't work with crossfire but asking for crossfire support in this game is silly. It only uses about 30% of a single 5800 card with anti aliasing at 60fps. And it looks fantastic as well.
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That wasn't the question being asked.
 
To answer the original question - I doubt it.

1) Bethesda has indicated that id tech 5 wasn't going to be for sale. They want to keep the tech in house for use on Bethesda titles like (possibly) Fallout 4. http://www.geek.com/articles/games/...e-used-for-bethesda-published-games-20100812/

2) If there is an engine that gives Unreal Engine 3 a run for its money, it looks like it would be CryEngine 3. Rage is impressive on consoles, but I haven't heard much great about it from PC users. CryEngine 3 on the other hand appears to be able to do some pretty amazing stuff on consoles (like run Crysis), and with high res textures looks wonderful on PC too. Both UE3 and CryEngine 3 support SLI/Crossfire.

3) Why would anyone design an engine that didn't work with SLI/Crossfire? Carmack is probably the only big name developer that could get away with that. Although, I honestly imagine the PC version of Rage will get patched so it does. I think their focus for Rage was the consoles, so they PC version didn't get the love it deserves.
 
The percentage of PC gamers who actually use a multi-GPU setup is miniscule in terms of market share.

Unfortunately the STEAM statistics for such setups are no longer available due to a flaw in detecting multi-GPU setups, I believe.

When it was available it was something like 3&#37; or less.

iD Tech 5 is something of an anomaly in terms of modern games engines in that it runs great on low to mid range GPU's offering a solid 60fps with nearly identical graphics and performance to a high end setup.

I myself run it on a 9800GT along with a Core 2 DUO E6600, both of which are considered entry level per the system requirements for the game.
 
MagnusTheBrewer said:
No, it's just poorly coded, much like Crysis. <runs and hides>
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no need to hide, you are right about both counts. Crysis and rage are both poorly coded.

You know what is coded very very well? The unreal engine.
It is awesomely multithreaded to take full advantage of 4 CPU cores (I don't know about more than that) and produces stunning visuals at very low hardware requirements. It is also cross platform for PC, Xbox360, PS3, AND wii.

Altough on occasion developers will use it to write games that are poorly coded on one platform or another (for example, mass effect was rather poorly done for the PC). The inherant strength of the underlying engine still shines through

Here is a list of games that use it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unreal_Engine_3

The real sad thing is that carmack goes on to bash PC as a gaming platform and explains that it is not reasonable to design games for maximum visual quality the PC is capable of... completely failing to understand that the "crappy console port" compaint is NOT about graphics quality but about games that tell you to "press triangle" in the tutorial when using a keyboard, crash every 10 minutes, feature horrendous console type save systems, and an interface designed for 480p resolution and a console controller.
 
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Poorly coded though it may be, I find it odd that to this day I still have yet to see a game that looks as good as the original Crysis (and doesn't rely on tricks like making the actual playable/viewable area the size of a hallway).
 
Red Storm said:
Poorly coded though it may be, I find it odd that to this day I still have yet to see a game that looks as good as the original Crysis (and doesn't rely on tricks like making the actual playable/viewable area the size of a hallway).
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nothing odd about it.
Crysis neglected the low and mid-range optimizations to focus on the high end. And the company went nuts in terms of graphics, well beyond what most people could afford (in terms if GPU costs).

Have you seen the movie avatar? The only reason your video games don't look like it is because we don't have GPUs fast enough to get reasonable framerate rendering something like that.
 
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