GeForce 9800GT - Parallel Gains?

Hello, all.

I have a computer with an NVidea 9800GT graphics card. While the computer overall performs extremely well, it's still not perfect in gaming. By perfect I mean I want to be able to play games in high graphics settings and not see any skipping(games from around the same era as the card, I'm not assuming I'll be able to play future games to this standard, I know hardware is quickly outdated.)

My question is, how much performance gain will I really see by installing a second 9800GT to run in parallel with the current one? Is it double the performance? Is it just a slight gain? Halfway between?

For some slight background, I'm big into playing Dragon Age. The game runs great 95% of the time. In areas with very high polygon counts, or lots of activity, I see just a minor bit of stuttering. That's what I want to make go away.

Also, if anyone knows of some good guides to optimize my computer for gaming, I'd appreciate that. I can only seem to find guides with the very basics. Clean and defrag, get rid of unused apps, shut down all background programs, etc. Are there other ways to optimize a computer so that it knows graphics are the priority?

Any advise you all can provide would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

Hi

Using two cards means SLI. This also requires the SLI bridge to be installed on your motherboard (if you lost/don't have it, you can't SLI). SLI will improve your performance about 1.5x on games that support SLI. If the game doesn't support SLI, only one card will be used and it will be the same as you are now.

You would do better getting a new card altogether. A GTS 250 or if you have the money, GTX 460, would do great with even most of the current games out.