Microstuttering & tri-SLI on P67?

I happened upon a couple articles on Tomshardware that piqued my curiosity, and wanted to get your thoughts.

1. Has microstuttering in SLI/CF been an issue at all for anyone?
Tomshardware

2. Any thoughts on P67+NF200 to get tri-SLI on P67 platform?
Tomshardware

That's an older post about the x58 platform, which is helpful, but my posts in this thread are probably more relevant since it's on the P67 platform and NF200 in specific.

Could we just pretend that Tomshardware was not mentioned? Not to say I don't sometimes still use them as another point of reference, among many other sites, if I'm doing some research on components or performance of something, but please do yourself a favor and never use them for your primary frame of reference. They have so many issues with their test methods that it boggles me. They never include minimum FPS for example, ever. Why on god's green earth would you have article to compare triple SLI/CF scaling between the x58 and P67 platforms, and not include things as basic as minimum FPS scores? And for micro-stutter and minimum FPS testing with triple and quad SLI/CF, why in the world only test on a P67 system and not do the same on a x58 system. They're always excluding important basic things like this. And lets not even go into how creepy it is to see them using the same diagrams I always use when talking about the chipsets and NF200. (Though, despite that they still have no idea what they are even talking about, here's a fun quote: "On the other hand, though, the [P67] CPU also only supports two graphics cards for SLI configurations. That's actually a limitation imposed by Nvidia.")

Anyway, why are you even asking about triple SLI/CF anyway, especially on the P67? It's nice to see these articles at least partially confirm what I was talking about with the NF200 helping alleviate bandwidth issues on Frankenstein triple/quad SLI/CF P55/P67 motherboards, but without them giving a comparison on minimum FPS and/or micro-stuttering between the two platforms that's only half of the picture. Beyond that, triple SLI/CF is usually a dumb idea anyway, regardless of the platform. Triple lower powered budget GPUs is dumb because you get high average FPS but low minimum FPS and stutter, especially at higher resolutions since they usually have less memory. Triple high powered GPUs is usually dumb, it's just way too much wasted power for most setups, and you still may get lower minimum FPS and stuttering. If you're trying to game on a 3D Surround setup with three 3D monitors or something then maybe triple high powered GPUs might have some merit, but then again one could argue merit of trying to game at 5760x1080@120hz with $1200 worth of monitor, $1500 worth of GPU, and $100 3D glasses.

Originally posted by mikec I knew P67 didn't support it, I was just curious how this chip seemed to mystically add bandwidth. Not really considering it.

Oh the CPU supports it just fine, thus my comment about them having no idea what they are even talking about when they plainly show a plethora of motherboards both with and without NF200s doing triple and quad SLI/CF like two pages later. There is no limitation imposed by Nvidia, they are retarded, they're just regurgitating incorrect outdated information about the initial plans for the NF200 chip when it was announced. Originally SLI was going to be completely limited to Nvidia made chipset motherboards only, but they lost the right to make chipsets for Intel CPUs via legal battles. So then in comes the NF200, they block SLI via a software block unless motherboard manufacturers buy and install their $30 NF200 chip. However everyone told them to stuff it and that idea fell through and the software block and NF200 requirement was never implemented. Instead they started marketing the NF200 as doubling PCIe lanes on a motherboard, but spoiler alert, it doesn't.

So P67 supports it just fine, but it only has 16 PCIe lanes and for whatever reason you break the lanes down into x16, x8, x4, x2, or x1 configurations, so to do triple or quad GPUs the best you could do would be x4/x4/x4/x4, which ends up being a bottleneck for most modern cards and defeating the purpose. I think what the NF200 does is let them get around that weird configuration requirement and just run the three (or four) GPUs straight through a full x16 lane, which lets them around that wasting lanes problem, might do some optimizing of the data transfer from the GPUs as well.

For micro-stuttering, have you ever seen it or had issues (let's say GTX570-level SLI or higher)? Hadn't heard of it before.

I might have it in one single game series, specifically Stalker: Clear Sky and Stalker: Call of Pripyat, and to a much lesser extent Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. It's very intermittent though, and these games are notorious for being badly optimized. Doesn't help that I play them heavily modified with HD graphic packs, my CoP has almost 2GB of HD texture, sound, and model replacements and is only one of two games that I've ever seen break 2GB of memory use in the Task Manager. The only other game to do that is my even more heavily modified SoC, which has a 13GB (no, seriously) mod folder of HD media replacements and additional content. I have to use a special 4GB aware .dll file just to keep SoC stable and handle it all, LOL. SoC isn't as graphic heavy as the sequals though, so CS and CoP are the only two to give me that weird stutter sometimes, and it's usually only during heavy rainstorms. The lightning in the Stalker games can be pretty crazy (crazy awesome), especially during the rainstorms when lightning is hitting all over and making everything in the game cast dynamic shadows in 10 different directions constantly. I've played the Stalker games on multiple systems and with multiple GPUs, both single and dual SLI, and they all have the intermittent stutter so I'm more apt to just chalk it up to bad optimization than micro stutter.

I've never had anything resembling micro stutter in any other game so far, and I've really put Lilim's dual SLI 480s through their paces over the last year. I've played just about every high demand out there with max+ settings with them at 1920x1200 and for the last half a year at 2560x1600. Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Crysis 2, ARMA 2, Metro 2033, all notta, so far only the Stalker games give me hiccups.