You mostly hear about the bad stories using a multi-gpu setup with driver issues etc. so I thought i would share my good experience with crossfire.
I have owned HD6850's since last year and have regularly updated the amd driver (no not every hotfix) over the course of this period. I am using an Amd X6 1055t @ 3.9ghz, 6gb DDR3 and 3 monitors setup in landscape eyefinity. (5760x1080 res)
I went xfire after using a single card for months and for me it was as simple as plugging in the new card and connecting the xfire bridge. Windows automatically installed the amd driver and it turned crossfire on once completed. I then ran 3dmark with xfire on and off after rebooting to check my score was in the right range for dual cards - the performance was right where it should be with it auto installing. (I assume nvidia/sli is the same process)
Every driver update i've done since 10.12hotfix (each month)has been no problem, amd drivers seem not to mind installing over the top of older versions. CAP's have always installed fine since they became a seperate package.
Personally as far as performance goes i have noticed massive gains in both real world games and synthetic benchmarks, msi afterburner shows the %usage from the gpu's and the 2nd gpu is constantly between 95-100% for as long as in-game.
I have never suffered from this micro-stuttering myth (i thought amd/nvidia fixed it a couple gen's ago when it was a real prob?) some people are worried about. I have also never suffered a worse game experience on 2 cards over 1 and I play a good selection of new games. Tbh i have never had a crossfire problem since owning the cards, have had the eyefinity desktop resolution mess up once but that was a quick uninstall/dsweeper/install fix.
I am convinced that most of the major drawbacks of multi-gpu systems have been overcome and the only real concern for some people is the lack of a crossfire game profile on release day for some games. Scaling is now excellent, most games work out of the box and i haven't needed to tweak driver settings.
Sure some people are going to have problems with it but whether the majority of prob's are user error or not is unknown.
With how easy my experience has been over a long time I think user error or at least some software conflict prob causes 90% of issues, crossfire is now easy mode and scaling rocks.
I have owned HD6850's since last year and have regularly updated the amd driver (no not every hotfix) over the course of this period. I am using an Amd X6 1055t @ 3.9ghz, 6gb DDR3 and 3 monitors setup in landscape eyefinity. (5760x1080 res)
I went xfire after using a single card for months and for me it was as simple as plugging in the new card and connecting the xfire bridge. Windows automatically installed the amd driver and it turned crossfire on once completed. I then ran 3dmark with xfire on and off after rebooting to check my score was in the right range for dual cards - the performance was right where it should be with it auto installing. (I assume nvidia/sli is the same process)
Every driver update i've done since 10.12hotfix (each month)has been no problem, amd drivers seem not to mind installing over the top of older versions. CAP's have always installed fine since they became a seperate package.
Personally as far as performance goes i have noticed massive gains in both real world games and synthetic benchmarks, msi afterburner shows the %usage from the gpu's and the 2nd gpu is constantly between 95-100% for as long as in-game.
I have never suffered from this micro-stuttering myth (i thought amd/nvidia fixed it a couple gen's ago when it was a real prob?) some people are worried about. I have also never suffered a worse game experience on 2 cards over 1 and I play a good selection of new games. Tbh i have never had a crossfire problem since owning the cards, have had the eyefinity desktop resolution mess up once but that was a quick uninstall/dsweeper/install fix.
I am convinced that most of the major drawbacks of multi-gpu systems have been overcome and the only real concern for some people is the lack of a crossfire game profile on release day for some games. Scaling is now excellent, most games work out of the box and i haven't needed to tweak driver settings.
Sure some people are going to have problems with it but whether the majority of prob's are user error or not is unknown.
With how easy my experience has been over a long time I think user error or at least some software conflict prob causes 90% of issues, crossfire is now easy mode and scaling rocks.