Evga GEForce 8800 GTS 320mb - SLI slower than Single GPU?

[infy567]

My rig:<ul><li>Intel Core 2 Duo 600 775 Chip</li><li>EVGA 775 Core 2 680i SLI Motherboard (1000 mhz front side bus)</li><li>2 sticks of 1G Corsair TWIN2X 2048-8500C5D DDR2 (1000 mhz)</li><li>2 Evga GEForce 8800 GTS 320mb cards in SLI</li><li>2 SATA Seagate 320 gig drives - 16mb cache 3gps xfr (EQ2 on 2nd drive for faster caching)</li><li>Aspire 680 Watt Power Supply</li></ul>I am using the latest drivers from NVIDIA.When I switch to SLI mode in Freeport I am still getting 14-30 FPS, even though I now can have everything on full (complex shaders is set to 100). Rest is set high. Shadows are average, but all turned on (except the last shader option).When I switch OUT of SLI mode, my FPS are 20-40 FPS.I see that in the NVIDIA control panel there is a setting for EverQuest II under "Program Settings" under the "Manage 3D Settings". Run in SLI mode with SLI monitoring on, SLI monitor isn't running - meaning that even if put into SLI mode with an SLI profile, EQ2 isn't in SLI mode.From searching left and right on the forums, there aren't any new topics covering SLI. First post seems to be in 2005 where a EQ2 tech guy said that EQ2 didn't support SLI and they'd let us know when they did.Ok, we're in 2007.... Does EQ2 YET support SLI? Because if it does then I'm doing it wrong, else, it runs better for me in single GPU mode.

[infy567]

I've searched everywhere and I've found nothing, except EQ2 customer support people stating "EQ2 does not support SLI".Even with my rig I'm only seeing 12 to 17 FPS in Qeynos Docks. With SLI tweaking I have seen no improvement.In WOW with everything on high I'm getting 90-100 FPS. In FARCRY I'm getting a whopping 403 FPS indoors and 157 outside. DOOM 3 I'm getting 67 FPS. QUAKE 4 87 FPS. BIOSHOCK 73 FPS.EQ2? 12 FPS.I have been playing EQ2 now for almost three years. And in that time I've upgraded my machine 3 times, the first TWO TIMES because I wanted to see BETTER graphics in EQ2. Now I have an impressive machine and yet the performance is nowhere near what I want.Friend of mine who coded all of the BattleField 1942 + games has a guy who worked for SOE on EQ2 working with him now. That guy said it isn't my fault and my rig is just fine - it's EQ2s rendering engine that sucks. It is just plain coded wrong and THAT is why no amount of money you can throw at a computer will ever be enough to run EQ2 the way you want to run it.So I give up SONY. You've got one hell of a nice game - best in combat, ambiance, atmosphere, guild and auction house. I have current subscriptions to WOW, LOTRO, Guild Wars and DDO and none of them come close to the gameplay of EQ2. But your rendering engine has not kept up with the times.In hard research through the NVIDIA forums, the common consent is that EQ2 is CPU intensive, meaning that the GPU is waiting for the CPU to finish as EQ2 is rendering geometry and shadow skinning on the CPU. On top of that, those with DUO or QUAD core CPUS (the new CPU types available now) are in even more trouble because EQ2 doesn't support multi-core CPU processors. This means if you have a QUAD, EQ2 is going to run even worse than a single CPU core because it can only use 25% (in a QUAD) of the CPU.