Is Crossfire pointless?

[Checkitman22]

After watching the livestream it seems there is no point to crossfire, you get litterally zero benefit from it. I'm curious what other people think. I know when I used to have CF 6970 I always complained that my games never felt any different between CF and non-CF despite the FPS being better. People called me crazy, but it looks like I pretty much hit the nail on the head.

[Barodil]

CF has a lot more Framtime issues than SLI. Thats the main reason why I got GTX 680 SLI and not 7970 CF -> massive microstuttering. And the fact that the reference design sounds like a hairdryer. The lower powerconsumtion on the green side also comes in handy but mainly the frametime problem sold me to Nvidia altough I payed (70€ no counting the AMD game bundle) more.

Als long as AMD does not get to the same lvl as Nvida now has I will not buy a "red" multi GPU setup.

So yeah, it's somewhat pointless...

[GamerDude]

I have a TriFire HD7970 for EF gaming @5760x1200, as well as a pair of GTX670 SLi'ed for S3D gaming.......do they micro-stutter? Yes, most certainly, even my GTX670's do micro-stutter in some games, most notably Bioshock Infinite. But I'm used to such micro-stutter since I've been using CF and SLi systems for a while. Sure, in some new games, when there's no SLi/CF profiles, a game may have negative scaling.....but such issues are quickly resolved by both companies with a driver update or hotfix. Are SLi/CF systems totally useless? Nope, not when you are playing @2560x1600/1440 or at EF surround mode, this is where the extra GPU(s) come in handy. With my 3x HD7970's, I can max out BF3 @5760x1200, Ultra setting + 4xMSAA.......and it's smooth.....silky smooth. Some have said that a 3rd card helps with micro-stuttering issue, I can't categorically say this to be true, but it sure as heck seems like it.

[Checkitman22]

im not talking about microstuttering.

[TechFan@ic]

im not talking about microstuttering.

You do get scaling up to more than 100% with crossfire, the only issue is lack of scaling in unsupported games and micro-stutter.

Usually games that have below average scaling are Nvidia optimized like Batman Arkham City, but even then there is a notable performance improvement.

As for micro-stutter which what Linus was talking about in the live stream, it has a very easy and very reliable fix.

You should take a look at this :

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990-devil13-7970-x2,3329-11.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990-devil13-7970-x2,3329-10.html

[AMD_Nemesis]

im not talking about microstuttering.

You do get scaling up to more than 100% with crossfire, the only issue is lack of scaling in unsupported games and micro-stutter.

Usually games that have below average scaling are Nvidia optimized like Batman Arkham City, but even then there is a notable performance improvement.

As for micro-stutter which what Linus was talking about in the live stream, it has a very easy and very reliable fix.

You should take a look at this :

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990-devil13-7970-x2,3329-11.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990-devil13-7970-x2,3329-10.html

It seems to happen in rushed games especially Farcry 3 its god awful lol.

[ZombifiedPyro]

I do not like XFire as much as SLI. If I wanted to use AMD, XFire is good when you have a high end cards like the 7970. Or if you have a lower end card such as a 7870, but in the future you do not want to go through the trouble of selling it and buying a higher end card. Also GPU tasks such as bitcoin mining and folding do not suffer from frametimes, therefore it is much better than a single card. In my FPS games especially I like to have very high FPS (100+ I can never reach that except in CoD) I feel like when it dips it doesn't matter because its still not getting close to being lower than the refresh rate of the monitor. Also, 120Hz monitors are great for gaming, but only if you GPU can get 120+ FPS.

TLDR: It has its benefits, but if you have the money for one 7970 vs 2 7870, the single card will most likely be better.