Multi Monitors and SLI weirdness, possible mouse bugs?

Hey Lax,

I have 2 MSI GTX 560 Ti boards in my rig. I noticed over the past couple of days that when running multiple instances of rift (4-5), and with SLI disabled, one monitor plugged into each card, that the second card is not being used at all (literally, it is showing 0-2% utilization, same as idle), and the first card is running at 99% utilization. The util number for card 1 drops as I quit clients. Also, the gpu temps for card 2 are 24C, which is my idle temp, while card 1 is hitting 60ish.

Today, I enabled SLI to see if there was a difference, and there is. Now, both gpus are at around 50% util, and both see temp increases (but lower than when they are in non-SLI mode). Also, I seem to be getting MUCH improved performance this way (although, it IS rift, so the improved performance can just be a result of the planets being in alignment). I remember reading several posts saying that SLI wouldn't be used since IS is forcing the game into a window, and this seems to contradict that.

However, and unfortunately, I'm seeing a wicked error (which I might also be seeing in non-sli, although less frequently, but the visual result is different) that is when I switch windows, sometimes the old slave window switches to monitor 1, but the image remains the same size (960x600) instead of going to 1620x1200 and is transfered to 0,0. The other 3/4 of the screen looks like the edges of the frame have been "smudged" (a la photoshop smudge) to the edge of the screen. In non-SLI mode, I believe this is manifested as a black screen. Once this happens, the only fix is to quit the game and restart it.

Dxdiag reports no errors, and I can run MSI Kombustion for hours with no errors.

Any ideas on how to resolve this? Can I provide any information to you to help? My system specs are below.

On the mouse, I use my scroll wheel as push to talk button for vent. Sometimes after pushing the button, the mouse pointer icon disappears but the mouse is still functioning. To fix it, I have to press the scroll wheel again, which restores the icon in the main window.

Also, I very rarely see the fake mouse point when the repeater is turned on. Both mouse issues are minor, but thought you should know.


System:
i7 950 OC'd at 4GHz and stable in long burns
EVGA x58 FTW3
24GB DDR3 1600 OC'd to 1746
MSI GTX 560 ti 1GB x2 (266.77 drivers)
Windows 7, DX9,10,11

Please let me know if I can help in any way.

This just happened to me in game again (gfx weirdness). I also noticed that the futzy windows are "frozen" -- they never update and appear to a screen shot image. Nothing I can do causes them to update or recover, except killing the offending clients.

I took a screen shot... It just gets weirder and weirder. Here's the ss of the screwed up screen:



What's really weird is the ss shows the full screen, and it isn't "frozen" at all. In fact, when I took the ss, the screen was showing something completely different... on either monitor.

I'm going to try connecting both monitors to the main card again, since the monitor/card thing wasn't actually forcing windows to use the second card for the other monitor (I wonder if this is new to Win7 or maybe a driver "feature")? I also wonder if I physically removed the sli bridge, if that would force both cards to work in non-sli mode...

Did a bit of research over on the NVidia forums...

It seems that SLI *DOES* now work in windowed mode, but in some games you lose performance (namely WoW hehe). I was able to run all 5 tonight (SLI and both monitors on the same card) with the master on High and saw 65fps. I didn't get the weird freezing issue, but I did lose some of the textures on one screen (was also common in warhammer and I believe might be related to the gamebryo engine).

The weird graphics issues above may be caused by a bad SLI bridge. I swapped in another to test it out and will report back in a couple of days if the problem is solved now.

In the meantime, I'll still check the thread if there are things you'd like me to try.

[Amrathe]

I saw the same GPU Utilization issues when I disabled SLI on my rig (2x460GTX in SLI). If you also monitor the clock speed on your cards when running 2 video cards w/2 monitors (1 monitor per card) you will see that the 2nd card also clocks itself down to idle speeds (425mhz on my setup). This will occur even if you run the clients each on their own monitor.

The only way I could get the game to use both video cards fully was to Enable SLI with both monitors hooked to the same card (you can still run 1 client per monitor with SLI).


I suspect it has something to do with how Nvidia codes the newer drivers for multi-monitor support. It appears that even with 2 video cards, the drivers want to offload all the processing onto a single card. When you enable SLI with multiple monitors hooked up, the drivers are switched to offload that rendering between the 2 cards.

The new SLI bridge didn't stop the weird banding issue. If I'm smart the next time it happens I'll take a picture with my phone and post it up.

Slot 3 failed and I reloaded the set through the IS tray icon. 5 minutes later, I was selling junk, and was swapping to my slot 2 character.

Beautiful pictures to follow:



So, I right clicked on the client bunch in the task bar:



No restore option (or anything but kill it, however you can maximize by selecting a window). The result of that is exactly as the first picture shows.

I pinned the app group to the task bar and used ctrl-right click to try to get at the nifty 'restore all windows' option:



But it's disabled... interestingly enough, choosing any of the other options reorders all the IS windows according to how they are at launch and fixes the frozen window on monitor 2 (top left):



Unfortunately switching it to the main monitor freezes it again as in the first pic.

I now have the ninja update with the about box for ISB which was to fix the disappearing windows and may be related to this. We'll see if that gives me more control, and if I can restore the windows.

Interesting event today...

I got the "rainbow" screen (like the first image in the post above), then another immediately, then another. I tried to get to the task bar to see if I could restore them, but couldn't. I kept trying -- alt-tab -- and eventually the game windows all went black. I hit ctrl-alt-delete to try to kill the first offender, and nothing happened. I sat there trying various things -- alt-tab, ctrl-alt-delete, esc, etc., but nothing worked. Finally, windows popped up a message that it couldn't display the security screen (from the ctrl-alt-delete) and that I should wait a bit to see if it could recover then hit escape. I hit okay on the popup, and then all the screens were back and working. My FPS was ultra low, however -- down to 16fps from 65fps on the main window (from the EVGA Precision G15 app). Also, the FPS display from IS was gone, although all my click bars, etc., were still up.

However, Everest was gone out of my G15 LCD, so I alt-tabbed to the desktop. Aero was off, and everest was no longer running. I jumped back into the game to finish my crafting, and killed 3 clients who were done. For whichever client was on the main monitor, in the upper right hand corner, my evga precision monitoring graphs were flickering in and out with high frequency (not the OSD, the graphs that display when you have precision maximized). Not the evga gui frame or app itself (which was up on monitor 2), just the graphs... Then, one of the last 2 clients froze -- no more raindbow, no black screen, but the it was frozen on a previous frame (like what happens in the slave windows when the rainbow effect is on). I could still interact with the game... and did several crafting things by "feel."

So:
1) The game isn't frozen, just the renderer.
2) Something woofed in windows this time -- even after quiting the game and IS, aero has not recovered (however, windows thinks it is still running).

Another occurrence which crashed everest. Once a client goes, I pretty much need to quit and restart them all because the other 2 are soon to follow. **Edit: However, it is not caused by everest as it just happened without everest running.

A vast majority of the time, it is slots 2,3,4 if playing 5, and 2,3 (with the occasional 4) if playing 4.

For reference, 2 = cores 3,4, 3 = cores 5,6, 4 = cores 7,8, and I've turned off core parking (although it happens with core parking enabled as well -- no big surprise I guess since I don't think windows is going to be parking any cores while playing 5 instances of rift hehe)

Something new to add:

So far today, no graphic rainbow screens of death, but I just encountered something that is probably related.

I hit F10 to swap to slot 3, and nothing happens, but it did kill the audio in the game... I tried to click on the slot 3 window with the mouse, same result. I switched to another slot window (2), and the change was very sluggish, with the added feature that after swapping, the new hot toon completely ignored all keyboard input for several seconds. In addition, after switching away from that window, I'm seeing an inverted model or two on slot 2's inactive window...

As with all the other symptoms, the only fix is to quit the game, and restart everything.

Any ideas at all?