Is SLI still cumbersome?

Hey nVidia group!

I haven't really been in the tech market since the 8800 era, where I feel SLI was beginning to mature.

My question is, does SLI still require you to select certain profiles for games?

I only ask this because I feel like I'm going to jump on acquiring 3 of those $400 Korean IPS panels, and I'm going to require a new GPU(s). I've never really been a strong fanboy for either ATI/nVidia, but I can't help but find myself stuck between an AMD 7970 or nVidia 670. (With the potential to xFire/SLI respectively for heavier gaming)

What I've always liked about AMD is that I feel xFire has done it right, where it just works. Also, I feel like this "eyefinity" is what I'm looking for when setting up 3 of these bad boys.

However, I've heard nVidia has their own response to "eyefinity" called "2D surround." (Which is an awful name, imo.) The only thing I like about them is that the 670 is more power efficient (and therefore cooler) than a 7970.

Anyhow, to get to the real point, I'm quite torn between these cards and I'm sure I'll have to get two of them at some point in order to run various games. (I'm not looking for crazy-max settings or anything. I'd just like to take full advantage of the pixels. Although, I also wonder if I'll just black out the side monitors and only use the center when gaming... For which, I believe AMD has a way you can hotkey for that to happen. I don't know though...)

Long story short because I feel like I'm rambling... This isn't a performance comparison question, just a "How User Friendly" thread. I heard AMD just works and has a way to EASILY disable the side monitors when gaming (if I decide to do it that way.) I just haven't read a whole lot about SLI's friendliness. Enlighten me, please?

SLI driver updates normally come with profile updates as well. The system will automatically pick what profile it needs for the game and if no profile is found it defaults to a standard one (or none at all, not sure on this part).

Last time I tried SLI it was a pain to use and I had to stick with the 280 driver series to get it to work. Then again when it worked it worked very well.

SLI wasn't bad to use when I had my dual 580s. It took a few driver installs/cleanings to get working properly but that may have been because one had a modded BIOS on it. Eventually when it was working the gains were excellent though.

I've been using SLI for a LONG time and it's rather user friendly, of course it all depends on what you'll do with it. In general, just keep your drivers updated, be sure to enable SLI in the control panel and... that's it... Yes the control panel has profiles for all the games and you may need to tweak it a bit on some occasion (for example I remember having issues with a 7 years old game and had to change a few settings to make it work properly) but in general if your drivers are up to date, you'll have have the latest profiles.

Some games are not optimized for SLI (some aren't for Xfire either) and you may have issues until they release the next driver but that's quite rare because they usually have something ready by the time the game comes out.

As for the multi-monitor thing, I don't know if there's an easy way to turn off the side monitors.

While I've never tried it I'd bet windows key + p works with 3 monitors when you just want one on.

As far as SLI goes I've built a lot of SLI machines starting around the 8800 era and never had any problems with it. I've also done some crossfire rigs, but did hit a few hitches which seem a bit more common with ATi than with Nvidia.

and you can hot-fix any new games to add the name to the profiles!

NVIDIA released new beta drivers yesterday and they included SLI profiles for Planetside 2 and Torchlight 2, neither of them has been released yet. As you can see, they try to at least have a basic profile ready ASAP.

In terms of SLI vs XFire, nVidia seems to do a much better job of getting profiles for the latest games out and optimizing existing profiles/drivers for better SLI performance. SLI was less prone to micro-stutter than all but the 6900 series AMD GPUs last time I saw it looked into as well. So keep that in mind if you tend to notice that (I don't really). I haven't seen anything that compares micro-stutter in Kepler vs GCN yet.

For the most part, SLI "just worked" for me when I was using it. If I played with profile settings, it was always to get better visual quality out of a game using an older engine, not because it didn't play well or didn't take advantage of multiple GPUs.