SLI and Crossfire Question

[pstarlord]

So, I know the broad strokes answer to what SLI and Crossfire are, but it seems that almost every time someone brings up running a gaming setup with SLI, or Crossfire, they are met with quite a bit of people saying it's a bad idea.  Just curious as to why it's a bad idea?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Cause a lot of games don't support it, and those that do often are stuttery. There aren't that many games that will make multi gpu a good value. Your normally better off just getting a single faster card. Multi gpu also uses a lot of power + heat.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Cause a lot of games don't support it, and those that do often are stuttery. There aren't that many games that will make multi gpu a good value. Your normally better off just getting a single faster card. Multi gpu also uses a lot of power + heat.

Most games these days don't scale well with SLI/Crossfire either, and you can actually take a performance hit in some games with SLI.

[pstarlord]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Cause a lot of games don't support it, and those that do often are stuttery. There aren't that many games that will make multi gpu a good value. Your normally better off just getting a single faster card. Multi gpu also uses a lot of power + heat.

ah cool.  Thanks for t hat.

[Princess Luna]

4 minutes ago, pstarlord said:

ah cool.  Thanks for t hat.

There are a lot of reasons to have multiple GPU for hardware acceleration purposes, but for gaming SLI really is end of road.

 

Here this is the latest and most recent benchmark of the crossfire solution:

To summarize a single game showed great gains, all the rest was pretty much a fail.