Is Crossfire/SLI really that bad?

[Tacitus]

Hey everyone,

 

Just a brief post.

 

People always seem to go on about the problems of SLI/Crossfire to the point you'd think pulling out your own teeth is preferable. Are the issues like bad scaling and bad drivers really that common today, or is this just a self-perpetuating legacy that doesn't reflect the reality of it?

 

Cheers

 

Chris

 

EDIT: Not to mention when people ask card x vs card y, one argument that frequently comes up is get the better card and Crossfire/SLI it when needed...

[Unhelpful]

The scaling can be good or bad depending on the game. The bad drivers is a load of bs. The lack of game compatibility is a load of bs. Source: I used dual 470s up until a couple months ago. I still prefer to go with a single stronger card though. Simply for heat-generation. Also because scaling usually isn't that great in most games, but it CAN be good.

[werto165]

the Chrysler Crossfire is abit slow, whereas SLI is fast. 

[SAV1OUR]

sli and cross fires fine, just 3+ way gpus scaling is poor

[SAV1OUR]

the Chrysler Crossfire is abit slow, whereas SLI is fast. 

1. "Chrysler Crossfire" what

2. they are both equally as fast...

[Nickolas47]

2 way sli/crossfire is good more is pointless

[Nickolas47]

1. "Chrysler Crossfire" what

2. they are bot equally as fast...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Crossfire

[Tacitus]

The scaling can be good or bad depending on the game. The bad drivers is a load of bs. The lack of game compatibility is a load of bs. Source: I used dual 470s up until a couple months ago. I still prefer to go with a single stronger card though. Simply for heat-generation. Also because scaling usually isn't that great in most games, but it CAN be good.

 

 

the Chrysler Crossfire is abit slow, whereas SLI is fast. 

I'm pretty sure that only hit the market for a few months here... thank God, it's ugly as fuck.

 

sli and cross fires fine, just 3+ way gpus scaling is poor

 

But thank you everyone for your responses. My logic is that I'm on a pretty tight budget and had hoped to get one 280x and crossfire it sometime later this year/early next year. Some benchmarks I showed put it at roughly equal to a 780ti, but I'm not sure how accurate that would be given the limited number of games tested on and so on.

[flibberdipper]

2-way is fine, but after that the benefits diminish and pretty much go away.

[werto165]

1. "Chrysler Crossfire" what

2. they are bot equally as fast...

Really don't know I'm really bored, trying to muster a toaster.

[Tacitus]

2 way sli/crossfire is good more is pointless

 

And thank you too for your input. May I ask if you've had any experience of sli/crossfire?

[SAV1OUR]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Crossfire

thats a horrible joke 

[Nickolas47]

And thank you too for your input. May I ask if you've had any experience of sli/crossfire?

i had two old amd gpus in crossfire and if i remember correctly i had about 40% increase in performance

[Nickolas47]

thats a horrible joke

actually i think its brilliant

[Tacitus]

i had two old amd gpus in crossfire and if i remember correctly i had about 40% increase in performance

 

Ok, thanks again.

[Lord Pantaloons]

Hey everyone,

 

Just a brief post.

 

People always seem to go on about the problems of SLI/Crossfire to the point you'd think pulling out your own teeth is preferable. Are the issues like bad scaling and bad drivers really that common today, or is this just a self-perpetuating legacy that doesn't reflect the reality of it?

 

Cheers

 

Chris

 

EDIT: Not to mention when people ask card x vs card y, one argument that frequently comes up is get the better card and Crossfire/SLI it when needed...

It's the latter, pretty much anyone who says that there are problems are people who only used it in the past or have never actually used it and are going on what they've heard. I can't speak for Crossfire but I've used SLI in the 6xx and 7xx series(660 Ti SLI/760 SLI) and I've had no issues at all. Scaling performance has been excellent in every game I've played and only one modern game I played didn't support SLI (Nexuiz) but that was far from it's only problem so SLI can't be faulted there. In some games like Borderlands 2 I saw 100% scaling after the drivers mature for a few months and others have scaled 70% or more. Three way SLI is even feasible now as you can see up to 30% additional scaling with the addition of a third card though it only shows at higher resolution, four way SLI still remains a limited affair with only a few games being able to produce small gains from the addition of the 4th GPU but at that point with that much money being spent you're doing it for the epeen anyways.

 

People say that the increased heat and power output are a downside but I fail to see how an obvious thing like the additional heat and power usage is something against it. Of course it will generate more heat and use more power, you just added another GPU WTF did you think would happen eh? It's like complaining that your car is getting worse mileage after putting 500lbs of bricks in the trunk. The 6xx and 7xx cards don't out out nearly as much heat as the 4xx and 5xx cards do so the heat isn't an issue. I was running two heavily overclocked 660 Ti's with a heavily overclocked i5 in a case with only two intake and one exhaust fan and I still never saw GPU temps over 72c and the addition of the second card only raised my CPU temp by 1c under a F@H load. As for the power consumption I've been monitoring the bills and with how much the bill fluctuates already it's impossible to tell the difference and my PC runs for up to 16 hours a day every day.

 

Basically anyone that bashes SLI at this point in uninformed and when asking questions about SLI or Crossfire you should take the advice from someone who has actually used the current iteration of it over advice from someone who has only used a previous iteration of it.

 

Hope this clears things up for you.

[Tacitus]

It's the latter, pretty much anyone who says that there are problems are people who only used it in the past or have never actually used it and are going on what they've heard. I can't speak for Crossfire but I've used SLI in the 6xx and 7xx series(660 Ti SLI/760 SLI) and I've had no issues at all. Scaling performance has been excellent in every game I've played and only one modern game I played didn't support SLI (Nexuiz) but that was far from it's only problem so SLI can't be faulted there. In some games like Borderlands 2 I saw 100% scaling after the drivers mature for a few months and others have scaled 70% or more. Three way SLI is even feasible now as you can see up to 30% additional scaling with the addition of a third card though it only shows at higher resolution, four way SLI still remains a limited affair with only a few games being able to produce small gains from the addition of the 4th GPU but at that point with that much money being spent you're doing it for the epeen anyways.

 

People say that the increased heat and power output are a downside but I fail to see how an obvious thing like the additional heat and power usage is something against it. Of course it will generate more heat and use more power, you just added another GPU WTF did you think would happen eh? It's like complaining that your car is getting worse mileage after putting 500lbs of bricks in the trunk. The 6xx and 7xx cards don't out out nearly as much heat as the 4xx and 5xx cards do so the heat isn't an issue. I was running two heavily overclocked 660 Ti's with a heavily overclocked i5 in a case with only two intake and one exhaust fan and I still never saw GPU temps over 72c and the addition of the second card only raised my CPU temp by 1c under a F@H load. As for the power consumption I've been monitoring the bills and with how much the bill fluctuates already it's impossible to tell the difference and my PC runs for up to 16 hours a day every day.

 

Basically anyone that bashes SLI at this point in uninformed and when asking questions about SLI or Crossfire you should take the advice from someone who has actually used the current iteration of it over advice from someone who has only used a previous iteration of it.

 

Hope this clears things up for you.

 

Thank you a lot. It seems that with a few exceptions you can get some outstanding performance at a reduced price compared to what you'd need in a single-card solution.

[gigabyte]

2 way SLI is good, wouldn't recommend going over that tho, it doesn't really give anything and people seem to have problems with it. Myself I still probably prefer 1 card

[Lord Pantaloons]

Thank you a lot. It seems that with a few exceptions you can get some outstanding performance at a reduced price compared to what you'd need in a single-card solution.

That's not entirely true, you shouldn't really plan on going for two midrange cards from the getgo. You should buy the most powerful single GPU that you can and then SLI down the road if you need the power or just want to do it for giggles. While it is true that I have more raw performance then a 780, my upgrade path is limited to replacing both of my cards with something newer because I can't do tri sli on my board rather than adding a second higher end card. If you were to get a 780 now you would have less performance immediately but in 2 years when a single 780 isn't enough you can add another for cheap due to the release of newer cards driving down the price of your card. My situation was slightly different, I planned on buying higher end GPU's but real life demanded that I cut it back and get something reasonable so I ended up with a 660 Ti, later I added another even though a single 660 Ti was enough for my single 1080p monitor. The other alternative is going for broke and SLI'ing two top tier cards but the worth of something like that is debatable from person to person due to the massive cost.

 

Basically what I was trying to say with my post is that SLI is an option, if your motherboard and PSU can support it. Any AAA game that comes out WILL support SLI, there are obvious caveats to that statement with examples like BF4 which supported SLI/Xfire very poorly at launch but they were later fixed for the most part and now work reasonably well within the scope of BF4 and how well it works in general(which isn't very well at all). Some indie games might not support it but I've yet to play an Indie game that didn't support SLI where I felt that I was having a sub par experience because I was only able to use one GPU. More often than not when SLI isn't supported the power of the extra card isn't even needed in the first place.

[Tacitus]

That's not entirely true, you shouldn't really plan on going for two midrange cards from the getgo. You should buy the most powerful single GPU that you can and then SLI down the road if you need the power or just want to do it for giggles. While it is true that I have more raw performance then a 780, my upgrade path is limited to replacing both of my cards with something newer because I can't do tri sli on my board rather than adding a second higher end card. If you were to get a 780 now you would have less performance immediately but in 2 years when a single 780 isn't enough you can add another for cheap due to the release of newer cards driving down the price of your card. My situation was slightly different, I planned on buying higher end GPU's but real life demanded that I cut it back and get something reasonable so I ended up with a 660 Ti, later I added another even though a single 660 Ti was enough for my single 1080p monitor. The other alternative is going for broke and SLI'ing two top tier cards but the worth of something like that is debatable from person to person due to the massive cost.

 

Basically what I was trying to say with my post is that SLI is an option, if your motherboard and PSU can support it. Any AAA game that comes out WILL support SLI, there are obvious caveats to that statement with examples like BF4 which supported SLI/Xfire very poorly at launch but they were later fixed for the most part and now work reasonably well within the scope of BF4 and how well it works in general(which isn't very well at all). Some indie games might not support it but I've yet to play an Indie game that didn't support SLI where I felt that I was having a sub par experience because I was only able to use one GPU. More often than not when SLI isn't supported the power of the extra card isn't even needed in the first place.

 

Yes, I'm aware that's true, but I recognise that as it stands I couldn't justify splashing on a 290, whereas I could get a 280x, and I'd probably look to crossfire it when I get a higher resolution monitor late this year/early next.

[jmaster299]

2-way is fine, but after that the benefits diminish and pretty much go away.

You say the same thing in every thread about SLI, but all you are doing is parroting something that is no longer true. It varies from game to game, but x3 SLI absolutely provides a performance gain, a performance gain that will be needed for people playing at 4K resolution. I'm not going to break it all down for you, but there is a thread right here on these forums with all the benchmarks. Even at just 1140p, SLI 780 Ti's went from 57fps average to 97fps average in Crysis 3 when going from x2 to x3 SLI.

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/73345-nvidia-gtx-780ti-benchmarks-review-teardown-2x-3x-4x-sli-and-4k-resolution/

[flibberdipper]

You say the same thing in every thread about SLI, but all you are doing is parroting something that is no longer true. It varies from game to game, but x3 SLI absolutely provides a performance gain, a performance gain that will be needed for people playing at 4K resolution. I'm not going to break it all down for you, but there is a thread right here on these forums with all the benchmarks. Even at just 1140p, SLI 780 Ti's went from 57fps average to 97fps average in Crysis 3 when going from x2 to x3 SLI.

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/73345-nvidia-gtx-780ti-benchmarks-review-teardown-2x-3x-4x-sli-and-4k-resolution/

First off, I don't.

 

Second, for a lot of people they probably will not notice, since a lot of people play at 1080p.

[jmaster299]

First off, I don't.

 

Second, for a lot of people they probably will not notice, since a lot of people play at 1080p.

This thread is not just about 1080p, and even at 1080p your statement is still false, the performance still scales. You keep claiming that x3 SLI doesn't scale but that is old thinking that is no longer true. Even x4 is viable these days.

[poseidon2988]

This thread is not just about 1080p, and even at 1080p your statement is still false, the performance still scales. You keep claiming that x3 SLI doesn't scale but that is old thinking that is no longer true. Even x4 is viable these days.

it scale in very few games thats right. like crysis...

[Jackbe]

I have two way GTX 670 SLI and it is great. It scales very well in most games and I have never noticed any microstuttering. I play at 1080p with a 144Hz monitor, so I want an FPS of around 120 while keeping the graphics as high as I can. This is more demanding than 1440p at 60Hz I believe and I'm noticing that my 670s are running out of grunt with some current games on ultra.

 

One important this to note, I would only ever SLI/crossfire the top two/three cards offered by a company, e.g GTX 770, 780 or 780ti. In almost every case it is much better to buy the best single card you can and then SLI it later. In my case, buying a 670 was much cheaper than a 680 and the performance difference was incredibly small, especially when the 670 was overclocked. The only time I'd recommend SLI/crossfire configurations of lower end cards is if you will never be able to afford one high end card. This is because two low/middle end cards will outperform one high end card in most cases.