Mulitple GPUs under Win 8.1

OldSmoke wrote on 10/18/2013, 6:19 PM

Today I had a bit of time on my hands to do some testing. I have Windows 8 in my drawer since last year, installed it for a week and went back to Windows 7. Now that Windows 8.1 is out and after reading a couple of reviews that all mention that 8.1 is so much better, I decided to give it a try. I made a clean install in an empty partition to have dual boot and not to loose access to my trusted Win7. I only had Win8Pro but went and got the free 8.1 update. After getting it al done, I installed VP12 and did some testing with the SCS Benchmark project.
From my system spec you can see that I have 2x GTX570 in my system and both are perfectly well utilized under Win7. With Win8.1 came driver 327.23 which I know is slower but I also noticed that it now only utilizes one of the two GTX570 when rendering to MC AVC for Internet. I tried do go back to 296.10 but I didn't manage to get that driver to work under Win8.1. I then found driver 296.17 which was the first driver that supported Win 8 but even then I could only get one GPU to be utilized. No matter what I set in the Nvidia control panel, under Win 8.1 only 1 GPU is utilized when rendering to MC AVC. As I said, under Win7 with driver 296.10 both GPUs are utilized up to 80%.
Does anyone else have a similar experience with Win8.1 or Win8 and multiple GPUs?
It is a big deal breaker for me aside from the still counter productive interface.
Forgot to mention, I am still on build 714.

Comments

VidMus wrote on 10/18/2013, 6:52 PM

From previous posts on this forum I always thought that only one GPU would ever be used by Vegas.

I am surprised that you said that you got both of them to be used. At least on Windows 7.

I would not make a partition for dual boot. Instead I would make at least two backups of the windows 7 boot and then make a new one for Windows 8.1.

But then again, I installed Windows 8.1 on my note book and am so far unimpressed.

Microsoft is now selling frills instead of an operating system!

ddm wrote on 10/18/2013, 7:55 PM

I too am surprised that you got 2 gpu's working in W7 and Vegas. I'm a big fan of Windows 8 but I have not been impressed with the gpu support for my 570 gpu. I've tried all the drivers with the same result, and that's only a single gpu. Not holding out much hope for that situation to improve considering how Nvidia is implementing things in it's new drivers. Oh well, I still find almost everything else works as well or better in W8 and I actually really like the other side of the interface.

OldSmoke wrote on 10/18/2013, 8:05 PM

You can see the two GPUs being utilized in a video in this thread. http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=4&MessageID=859391. That was done under build 563 but the same applies to build 714. Driver was and still is 296.10 or 275.33 under Win7Pro64bit. In the Nvidia control panel you have to select either "Disable SLI" or "Activate all Displays". The SLI bridge itself doesn't make any difference and I leave it on as I use full SLI for my 3D CAD software.
I did manage to get SLI working under Win 8.1 but with the same result as under Win7, it is slower then other settings and it can only drive 2 of my 3 monitors.

CJB wrote on 10/18/2013, 10:43 PM

While I have no comments about GPU I can offer a word of advice about making Win 8.1 somewhat painless transition.

Go to the desktop and right click on the taskbar selecting properties. Select the navigation tab and under "Start screen" check the first checkbox. This will bypass the namby-pamby Metro interface and take you straight to the desktop on login and closing apps.

Win 8.1 had the "promise" of a start button ala Win 7, Vista, XP but failed to make it like the old version. There is free software than can give you that old startbutton that works rather well:

http://www.classicshell.net/

I hope this is helpful (if not motherhood).

c

skeeter123 wrote on 10/23/2013, 12:23 AM

OldSmoke,

Have you had any luck, render speed-wise, with Win 8.1 and various Nvidia drivers? Which one did you settle on?

I just got VP12 (build 726) up on my new rig (i7 4930k @4.4GHz, 16G 2.GHz DDR3 quad-channel, SSD drives Win 8.1)

(Don't get me started on the Win 8.1 interface...sheesh)

Thx mate...

OldSmoke wrote on 10/23/2013, 8:57 AM

@skeeter123

I actually gave up on it. Aside from the interface, the non support for dual gpu was the deal breaker for me. With a single GPU, I think it renders about as fast as Win7 but preview performance is suffering. I didnt manage to get older drivers such 296.10 running under Win 8.1 and as we know, any later version is just not as good.
I still have the Win 8.1 partition on my drive but it will be, like Win8 before, just for toying around with it. That is actually all it is in my opinion, a toy rather then a professional interface.

skeeter123 wrote on 10/23/2013, 12:30 PM

@OldSmoke..

I could not agree more....I had high hopes for 8.1, but alas....

Still working on getting a complete, long term (40 minutes of media) render to complete without crash...

...sigh...

skeeter123 wrote on 10/31/2013, 1:52 AM

...and complete it did. The old "Turn off the GPU in Video Preferences" gotcha, got me..grr....

Looking like about 35-45% faster renders than the old OC' 2600k. (much more testing needed..)

Win 8.1 still takes some getting used to. No RAW support in Windows Explorer for my still camera (RX100 M2) and it still feels like it has a multiple personality disorder....

Cold-start to desktop in about 7-10 seconds is pretty good. Now that I figured how to boot to desktop....shutdown is pretty quick, too.

..

dlion wrote on 10/31/2013, 9:27 AM

i couldn't get 8.1 to install. 7 days of aggravation, 2 ms techs on my pc, can't get it to install. but i digress...

there are 331.xx drivers available from nvidia that are supposed to be for 8.1. i can't speak to how that one will work, but you could always go back to the older one. the newer one has a better install too.

OldSmoke wrote on 10/31/2013, 12:57 PM

You can't go back very far with Nvidia drivers on Win 8.1 as only two versions are recommended for it; as of now. The really good driver for GTX5xx cards is 296.10 and that doesn't install well and doesn't work well either under Win 8.1. Even the newer driver such as the 331.xx does not support dual GPU for VP12.