GTX 970m SLI or GTX 980m SLI

[ilovepineapple]

Hi guys, I need some few advice. I've been playing Skyrim for awhile, I've tested several ENB's but it would seems that my mobile GPU (GTX 960m 4GB VRAM) isn't enough to run the game (with ENB) at 60 FPS, mostly it drastically drops my FPS below 30 FPS to 29 FPS or worst 24 FPS and it's not playable. So I've been thinking of buying myself a new laptop with SLI number, now most of you will probably recommend of building a desktop but I couldn't because I travel a lot and there is no way that I will be bringing an entire desktop, so I prefer portability (I know, I'm wasting lots of money). I will just make things simple, does Skyrim support SLI mobile GPU and does a dual GTX 970m or dual GTX 980m enough to run the game with the most demanding ENB and 4k texture mods at 60 FPS? On the second thought, how's a single GTX 980m performs?

Edited July 27, 2015 by ilovepineapple

[billyro]

You can't really expect to run Skyrim with an intensive ENB at full resolution with 4K textures at 60 frames per second on a laptop. Besides, your current laptop sounds more than adequate for gaming: just reduce your ENB settings, use 2K/1K textures instead of 4K and you'll get much better framerates. Also, grass is another performance killer - if you have heaps of it, tweak the grass settings in the .ini files (grass mods usually have instructions).

 

As for your other questions... I dunno. Someone else would probably be able to answer those.

Edited July 31, 2015 by billyro

[obobski]

I think the better question to ask is "does SLI mobile support Skyrim" - and this isn't just "will SLI work with Skyrim" but also "will the machine do it without overheating and cooking itself to death." As far as I'm aware SLI and CrossFire do still work with Skyrim (I had CrossFire working a few months back; haven't tried SLI), although it isn't great (you can get odd stuff like the "flickering menus bug" and some benchmarks don't show very good scaling), and wanting to run everything 4K all the time at high frame-rates is an extremely tall order even for a desktop system; I agree with billyro on just turning some settings down. The biggest issue I could see with two GTX 980Ms or similar would be significant throttling under load, due to how much power they will draw and how much heat they will therefore dissipate, and you're wanting all of that shoved into a small package. I also wouldn't consider any of those SLI-equipped DTRs to be very mobile systems - they tend to be heavy, bulky, and have awful battery life.

 

I'd say stick with what you have, and lower some settings to get performance where you want it.

 

As far as scaling goes, here's a somewhat older review that has a few multi-GPU solutions in Skyrim:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_780_SLI/18.html

 

They "scale" but it's fairly minimal. I've never seen any reviews like this that cover ENBs or extensive modification, but it should at least give you some data to ponder.