Optimal settings for 2 GPUs in LM Studio

Hello everybody. I've got a 5070ti and a 5060ti both 16GB in my system which is a 5900X and 64GB DDR4 RAM. I'm trying to run some 16-18GB models like Qwen, Cydonia, Skyfall.

I'm having problems utilising the VRAM I have to get the best usage out of it. LM Studio sees the 32GB VRAM but regardless of if I use Tensor parallelism, Split evenly or Priority order I always get an error after waiting for about 5 minutes for the model to load.

The pattern is always the same: The loading progress bar for the model starts off quickly then crawls in the last 5-10%. Then I get an error reporting that the model couldn't load.

Does anybody have any tips for optimal settings to get the best out of my system? I know that having 2 GPUs doesn't magically mean you have double the memory and there's caveats. But nevertheless I've also read that LM Studio does have the capability to leverage those 2 GPUs to improve speed.

(EDIT) I should add that I've been trying context lengths of 16384, 32768 which LM Studio is saying will use 17 GB of VRAM so well within the reported 32GB I have. I've even had it working occasionally but most of the time the model fails to load.

(EDIT 2) Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. Having implemented everything people have said here, I'm getting much better results for context and memory use and my models are loading now.

Many thanks for any help.