Effectiveness of crossfire?

[Docretier]

My current graphics card is an rx 480 by gigabyte, and I was wondering if once it ages enough to lower its performance if crossfire with another 480 would be more effective than buying a newer card(if the price of the 480 drops enough to justify it). So what is the consensus around here for crossfire and SLI? Have any of you seen performance gains by using it?

[Nocte]

Te consensus here is Single card > xfire/sli when talking about value for money. Double card just doesn't scale well enough to justify the double price. 

[FloRolf]

Ofc you see performance gains. But they reach from literally nothing or even doing worse all the way to like 80%. (except computational tasks where you can see 100%).

 

You gotta see what the time says. If another 480 is like 50 bucks while a new generation card is 700 then crossfire might be a good option. 

However I generally don't recommend sli or crossfire. 

- more power consumption 

- no perfect scaling

- more heat

Etc. Pp. 

[Angusticlavii]

sell your rx480 and get a better GPU

 

edit: you can probably still get the price you paid for it.

[Froody129]

Really only worth it for the top end cards and you still want more performance. If it’s just for fun go ahead but it requires a bunch of tweaking that imo isn’t worth it. 

[Radium_Angel]

And some video games have very poor SLI/xfire support to the point they play *worse* with dual matched video cards.

(I'm looking at you, Armoured Warfare)

[Broken software]

 It’s terrible don’t do it please.

 

[Aw_Ginger_Snapz]

If you're planning to buy a used RX 480 at a good price (which won't be hard to find due to concurrency mining inevitably crashing), and you're not going out of the way to get a motherboard or PSU to be able to set it up, then you should consider it. My experience with crossfire has been pretty solid. Although, I can't speak for anyone else. I used to run a Radeon HD 7970, then bought a second one 3 years later at a great price for crossfire. While some games didn't scale well, most of them scaled very well. However, about 2 years later I upgraded to a GTX1070 because I had 2 other computers that needed GPUs, so I no longer use them in crossfire. Honestly, I wouldn't listen to anyone who hasn't experienced SLI or Crossfire first hand because there's more to it than just scaling and raw performance. In my opinion, it's all about the utility and versitility of SLI and Crossfire that make them worth your time. SLI and Crossfire are not good for future proofing a system. But they're a great, cost-effective method of keeping a system relevant after a few years or so. Like I said earlier, when you eventually upgrade to a more powerful single card years from now, you can keep around your two RX480s and use them in other machines that may need a video card for light gaming, video playback, productivity applications, or just a boost in overall performance above integrated graphics. 

 

The point is, if you already have a motherboard and PSU that support crossfire, and you're not buying a second card now and waiting for later, then you may definitely want to consider using Crossfire on the RX480. Remember that there is no rush in your case because the RX480 is still a very good card as of now. I would just wait for cheap used cards to show up before you crossfire.  

[Darkseth]

Crossfire / Sli with 2 midrange Cards was NEVER a good idea. Not today, not 10 years ago

If it were a good idea, everyone would do it. Good ideas spread fast. ^^

 

The scaling isn't great (depending on your resolution, you only get GTX 1070 performance, which is around 40% more), and be beaten by a GTX 1080.

Your Power consumption will double, your heat output will double, you might have to wait for driver updates for Sli profiles etc etc.

If you're lucky with your Games, you might see 50-70% scaling (150-170% total performance. almost never 180% or more), if you're unlucky, you might even get NEGATIVE performance, because both cards have a usage of less than 50%: It CAN happen, altho very rarely.

 

Multi-GPU support is beeing dropped. AMD is dropping it, Nvidia is dropping it, and game developers drop it too. it will die out.

 

Watch Jokers video: 

 

And many other Users who tried it for several years. Many are not happy with it, too many problems, for not enough gain.

 

In Short: Don't do it. If you don't have enough performance, you sell your Card, and Replace it with a stronger one.

Sli/Crossfire makes NO SENSE, if there is a Single GPU, that offers your desired Performance.

 

If you already have the stronger single GPU, and you still don't have enough Performance.. Then buy a second one, if you can't reduce settings.

But yea, i wouldn't recommend going the crossfire/Sli route. Too many disadvantages.

But check your games, if they support crossfire, and how the scaling is.

 

[Frankenburger]

5 hours ago, Darkseth said:

Multi-GPU support is beeing dropped. AMD is dropping it, Nvidia is dropping it, and game developers drop it too. it will die out

4 out of every 5 AAA games work with SLI, and support is being continually improved on. Yep, CF/SLI is totally dying. /s

 

https://babeltechreviews.com/the-50-game-gtx-1070-ti-sli-review/3/

 

Quote

eighty percent of our 50 games – 40 games – generally scale positively with SLI and most of them give solid performance increases depending on the resolution. 4K often sees the most benefit where it is mostly needed.

 

NVIDIA should be complimented for continually working to improve SLI scaling in games that can scale, and over the past year, we find SLI to be “most improved”.

 

Also, that Joker Productions video is extremely flawed, as I pointed out here

 

 

[andrewmp6]

Honestly i would ride out the card you have tell it no longer plays games how you like.At that point i would grab a newer card like a vega if you want to stick with amd,Or cross over and get a 1070ti or maybe 1080ti or whatever the next round of video cards that replace them all are.As far as sli and crossfire i wouldn't use it unless you want 4k at max settings and above 60fps.Most new high end cards will run 1440p games at over 60fps at high settings.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

15 hours ago, Docretier said:

My current graphics card is an rx 480 by gigabyte, and I was wondering if once it ages enough to lower its performance if crossfire with another 480 would be more effective than buying a newer card(if the price of the 480 drops enough to justify it).

That's the question nobody can answer, because nobody knows which prices you will be facing  At a low enough price, it may be attractive; if expensive enough, just upgrading to a different single card will be better.

If we leave cost-effectiveness aside then and focus only on effectiveness... then, again, we can't tell  Because, whatever we have experienced in the past, the key is how will it perform in the games you'll be playing at the time you decide on the upgrade.

 

15 hours ago, Docretier said:

Have any of you seen performance gains by using it?

I have tried it, and it worked well, but I haven't done any measurement of performance change. Which wouldn't matter anyway because my 60Hz screen is maxed out int eh games I played. I did see a drastic reduction in GPU usage, of course, and could get away with higher settings. I think I only ever encountered 1 game I was playing and didn't have an optimized crossfire profile (the game also happened to have one of the worst "GPU hammering to graphic quality" ratios I ever seen ), 2 if you count Minecraft. So, for me, it was pretty much plug and play (or plug, set the crossfire profile in Crimson, play).

 

What I think could be a problem in the future for CrossFireX is support: active support for it does make a difference. As opposed to, I don't know, the amount of VRAM or the clock of the GPU, CFX or SLI don't "just work" the same way for every game, you need to allocate the workload to the different GPUs somehow. There is a default way to do it, and when no other profile is specified the drivers will revert to it. These default settings will deliver performance differences all over the place depending on the game, and that's the reason you'll even find people negative results. More often, you'll see people seeing an improvement in framerates, but complaining about recurrent "micro-stuttering". The moment you use a game-specific profile, though, the problems mostly go away. When a specific profile isn't available, you can play around with settings, use the profile of another  game based on the same engine, etc, so it's not like you need a specific profile for every game, but it makes things easier. If AMD/Nvidia stop producing profiles, results of multi-GPU setups will suffer.

 

All of that, though, refers to games using up to DirectX 11. With both Vulkan and DirectX 12, multi-GPU support shifts from the driver to the game itself. Hence, looking into the future, your CrossFireX experience will depend on (1) whether AMD continues to release DirectX 11 CFX profiles for games on DX11 (or supporting both DX11 and Vulkan/DX12), (2) whether developers decide to include multi-GPU support in DX12 and Vulkan based games (which in principle allows for leveraging any GPUs you include in your system, but good luck with people coding for that ).

Therefore, if you find yourself considering CFX in, say, 4 years, the question will be how many games you care about then are on DX11 and AMD provides a profile for (or you can easily find a good profile for), and how many games on DX12 or Vulkan have good multi-GPU support built in. If the hints towards lower multi-GPU support by AMD and Nvidia get confirmed over the years, and you like playing the latest games, it may be worse than it is now. If, like me, you find yourself playing older games and lagging behind launch dates, then it may be OK anyway. If so, it would be time to check used GPU prices