ATI CrossFireX vs. NVIDIA SLI New Games Performance

[FrgMstr]

ATI CrossFireX vs. NVIDIA SLI New Games Performance - We want to know how three brand new games perform with SLI and CFX. We take F1 2010, Civilization V and Dead Rising 2 through our apples-to-apples testing using GTX 480 SLI, HD 5870 CFX and GTX 460 SLI. This is a must read, as it reveals some rather unforgiving truths about new game releases and multi-GPU technology.

 

[Trimlock]

interesting, i've never seen the performance change so much between games like this before (other then crysis). wonder if its due to bad game programming or lack of patches?

 

[AceGoober]

Very eye opening. Quite odd with the SLI configs dropping framerates down so much. It will be interesting to see if performance gains are to be had with earlier drivers.

Thanks!

 

[Raap]

What I find somewhat disturbing is how close the GTX460 and GTX480 really are.

F1 2010: 84 vs 77 fps Surround: 65 vs 61
Dead Rising2: 71 vs 61 fps

I'd expect the gap to be larger considering the GTX480 is quite a bit more powerful, yet when placed in SLI it seems to lose much of that advantage.

 

[hesho]

and this only confirms why i do NOT want to get sli or xfire...

very nice article though /ok

 

[Romir]

Thanks for all the multi-gpu scaling coverage Kyle. Fall of 2008 with 4870x2 was almost as bad as Vista 64s launch with a Nvidia card. It's sad there hasn't been too much progress since then, and all the more a shame because these higher end setups are becoming an even bigger niche that's hard enough to justify.

 

[Lord_Exodia]

Very interesting, I hope this wakes up some of the boys at both camps to get off their ass and do something for their customers. I wonder if you can fix the nvidia SLi scaling by playing with the SLi rendering modes. Its been a long time since I ran SLi, Do they still offer Alternate Frame Rendering, Split Frame etc...If so in cases like this it would be interesting to know if modifying those would help rectify those issues. Either way there is no excuse from either side. They need to get their acts together.

I'm also amazed at how close GTX 460 is to both 480 SLi and 5870 crossfire. I mean that card is an amazing value and the SLi numbers for that GPU continue to astonish. It's almost like the card becomes 4x as valuable simply by throwing it in a dual gpu configuration.

 

[King Icewind]

Thanks for the review Kyle & Brent!

5850 (xfire) has been given the boot!

 

[3DChipset]

Out of curiousity, does the renaming of the .exe files in the games that are broken enable proper dual use? I remember in the day that renaming the .exe files sometimes enabled SLI / Crossfire to work properly?

 

[Gorankar]

To be fair a month from now, these results will change. But multi GPU is not always all it is cracked up to be if you want to play games on release day. Though I thought everyone that had SLI/Xfire already knew that.

Out of curiousity, does the renaming of the .exe files in the games that are broken enable proper dual use? I remember in the day that renaming the .exe files sometimes enabled SLI / Crossfire to work properly?

I think "AFR-D3Dfreindly.exe" is the one for AMD cards as I recall. But it does not always work out as planned either. Some games just do not like AFR and others do not really care for split, and some don't like either.

 

[jimbobb]

Crossfire has a big Problem that edit Profiles that determine how MultiGPU can be scaled, it relies on exe renaming or ATI their profiles. NVIDIA SLI is significantly better, you can create Profiles themselves, determine the compatibility values and to fix the scaling. There are Nhancer or NVInspector. ATI delivers the CF-X of Profiles often very late and therefore it is imperative the ATI reveals their profiles.

 

[adonn78]

From what I can tell it really all boils down to drivers and individual support within each game.

 

[Joshua80]

great, thanks.

 

[MacLeod]

Wow! I agree with the guy above that its just better to go with a badass single card. SLI and Crossfire are just riddled with bugs, problems and doesnt seem to be worth the hassle.

 

[cannondale06]

I know sli/crossfire is fairly common for enthusiasts nowadays but there are still too many issues. I play games to relieve stress not add to it so its single gpu only for me.

 

[WorldExclusive]

I agree with improved driving skills with Eyefinity.
I was ok at Dirt 2 until I got Eyefinity, now I blaze through tracks like a pro.
I'll pick up F1 2010 sometime within the next month or when it goes on sale.

Poor Multi-GPU support? Tell me about it.
ATI hasn't made a decent driver for the 5970 since 10.5a. BFBC2 still has random performance from driver to driver.
You would think ATI will take care of it's highest paying customer(5970 buyer).

 

[Deleted member 147607]

Kyle,

I appreciate these updates.

I can't speak for others, nor will I attempt to do so...but personally I was so fed up with my search for a solution to the "dual screen flickering" issue with AMD's drivers, that I sold my cache of 5 series cards and moved back to used GTX 260/275/285's for the office as well as home. I had to, our business depends on multiple monitor configuration's - that work without question.

Frankly, I don't know what I'm going to do next go around, but it won't be another attempt at Xfire or Eyefinity until I see some support for the product after purchase.

Having said this...I do prefer the Eyefinity solution because of only needing one video card to drive triple monitors. 95% of my pc's have one pci-e slot.

I only hope when they begin to address these issues you've outlined, AMD doesn't pull another "active adapter in two months".

Best Regards,

Liquid Cool

 

[Derangel]

Kyle, Brent, have either of you tried the SLI Enhancements EVGA puts out? I know for the purposes of this article it wouldn't be fair, but I wonder if those help at all.

 

[kllrnohj]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why requiring SLI for Nvidia Surround is a deal breaker for me.

I'll stick to my trouble free single GPU single video card, thank you very much.

 

[Aix.]

Any of you guys use the "RadeonPro" application developed by japamd over at Guru3d? http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=322031

I don't have any of these three new games yet (I want F1 2010, but I also want a wheel before I buy it), but I wonder how RadeonPro works with them. It's an interesting program nonetheless. For me, playing TF2 I couldn't get CFX to work without getting stuttery performance even with the official profiles. After installing RadeonPro I was able to select AFR and other tweaks for butter-smooth gameplay (Eyefinity, 6088x1080).

 

[Blacklash]

Yep many games seem to be written for the console with PC gaming as an afterthought. That said, I am a PC gamer. I don't own a console.

Perhaps one day MGPU and multi monitor gaming will be more mainstream and right now it's mostly niche. The overwhelming majority of consumers simply don't bother with it.

Next time I grab a GPU I am going back to a single configuration myself. In addition, I've no intention of going with 3x LCDs.

I enjoy watching what other folks do with these things though. Yes, I know I will be committing [H]ard heresy by gaming on a single GPU with a single 1920x LCD

Carmack put forth some interesting opinions about these things a while back for PC Perspective.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532&type=expert&pid=3

 

[Godmachine]

Its so crazy that the GTX 460 SLI setup is only 10 fps or less away from the far far more expensive GTX 480 SLI setup. What the fuck is going on there? How can the GTX 460 which is around 200 bucks a video card (making a $400 rough total) be even coming into the same ball park as the GTX 480 which at its cheapest is $465 per video card (making a $930 dollar rough total meaning its 530 dollars more expensive than a GTX 460 SLI setup).

Seriously both company's are dropping the ball , people who spend money a GTX 480 SLI setup seem like they are flushing money down the drain. Do these setups perform vastly different when not used in multi-monitor setups?

 

[Matrices]

Can't say this piece changed my appreciation of SLI. Three random new games, none of which I intend to play, two of which have no large PC following, and one of which (Civ V) is way more CPU than GPU dependent?

The one issue I do have, though, was illustrated with Civ V - the failure of ATI or Nvidia to get companies to center the HUD elements in their games for triple monitor play. It makes games like Dragon Age and Civ V completely worthless because I'm not spending my time rubbernecking across three screens.

Anyway, with all that said, the sad fact of the matter is indeed that sinking money into PC hardware is a case of throwing good money after bad. Publishers are fucking over PC gamers more and more, developers are stampeding toward consoles, and it just doesn't make any sense to spend thousands of dollars on PC gaming unless you are rich or really like certain niche PC games or simulators.

For most folks, it's just going to be a case of anger and frustration as they realize that this game or that game doesn't have antialiasing, or multi-GPU support, or triple monitor support, or has a completely consolized feel, or requires 20 tweaks to work properly - on and on and on.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

Kyle, Brent, have either of you tried the SLI Enhancements EVGA puts out? I know for the purposes of this article it wouldn't be fair, but I wonder if those help at all.

see the word i bolded.. probably wont happen.. evga and [H] dont get along very well


interesting review though.. another reason why i'll stick to single cards and why waiting for the 6870/6970 will be the better option..

 

[BlueStorm]

Deleted.

 

[kllrnohj]

Can't say this piece changed my appreciation of SLI. Three random new games, none of which I intend to play, two of which have no large PC following, and one of which (Civ V) is way more CPU than GPU dependent?

If Civ V is so CPU dependent, how was 5870 CF 126% faster?

Civ V is clearly a case of broken SLI - the CPU had nothing to do with that one.

 

[Godmachine]

Perhaps its a mixed bag of poor development to take advantage of whats there and able to be taken advantage of and poor driver support for these games. They've only been out for 1-2 weeks , its possible that with a driver revision and game patches these problems could be dealt with.

 

[BlueStorm]

If Civ V is so CPU dependent, how was 5870 CF 126% faster?

Civ V is clearly a case of broken SLI - the CPU had nothing to do with that one.

Civ 5 is yes, but the Dead Rising case is not necessarily SLI or CFX's fault... the game has a lot of interframe dependencies. The CFX and SLI profiles remove these transfers where possible by just opting not to transfer the data to the other GPU, but sometimes you can't remove the transfers without causing corruption (i.e. the game intentionally preserves data across multiple frames, which means you have to stop to transfer the data instead of rendering the next frame). So SLI and CFX can only do as well as the application will allow without introducing corruption. This is often the case with games.. they limit what can be done to increase scaling.

One example is that if the developer renders a frame and simply does not clear some resource, despite not caring if the data is still there when they start work on the next frame... then no big deal, the transfer is unnecessary and can be eliminated by NVIDIA/AMD.

But the driver doesn't automatically know "hey it screws up the next frame if I don't transfer this data to the other GPU". So NV and AMD profile the games to ensure eliminating the transfers don't cause corruption. But let's say that developer wants some data from the previous frame to do a motion blur effect (a legitimate reason for having data persist between frames, requiring a transfer between GPUs). Eliminating the transfer between frames would screw that effect up. So NVIDIA and AMD have no choice but to leave it there, transferring data every frame, reducing scaling.

 

[Revdarian]

That Civ5 issue is for me a dead ringer about a very specific kind of SLi issue, one that was present on ATi too:

It seems that the GPU drops it's clocks from 3d mode to 2d and fails to recognize that it has to go back up.

Did you guys try it with single card configs for Nvidia? if what i think is true, the same drop off should pop up.... And i think it is a clock drop out because that performance difference is waaaaaaaaaaay above just "multi gpu" being on or off.

 

[Brent_Justice]

To be fair a month from now, these results will change. But multi GPU is not always all it is cracked up to be if you want to play games on release day. Though I thought everyone that had SLI/Xfire already knew that.




I think "AFR-D3Dfreindly.exe" is the one for AMD cards as I recall. But it does not always work out as planned either. Some games just do not like AFR and others do not really care for split, and some don't like either.

Steam games have issues with renaming the EXE, the launcher won't work

 

[Finger]

To me, the solution is obvious: open up this part of the system to the community, who can create SLI/Crossfire profiles immediately. It doesn't matter how techy it might seem - people will figure it out. But I suppose that'd be giving away too much info to the competition, huh. :/

(And it'd help if the drivers would let you know in some way, maybe through a screen overlay, when a profile's loaded, so you know when you're actually getting proper support and when you're not.)

 

[Pieter3dnow]

weird benchmarks in some cases

 

[tosgamer]

That Civ5 issue is for me a dead ringer about a very specific kind of SLi issue, one that was present on ATi too:

It seems that the GPU drops it's clocks from 3d mode to 2d and fails to recognize that it has to go back up.

Did you guys try it with single card configs for Nvidia? if what i think is true, the same drop off should pop up.... And i think it is a clock drop out because that performance difference is waaaaaaaaaaay above just "multi gpu" being on or off.

Single card config for Civ 5 works fine for Nvidia. When I disable sli on my 2 gtx 465's the game runs fine. When I enable sli on them I get the exact same issues mentioned in this article. Its just sli that is currently broken.

 

[Finkus]

I couldn't agree more with the closing comment. In the last year that I have owned my 5970 I've had to switch internal crossfire off for many AAA games because the experience is simply worse with two cards. There's either broken compatibility, poor performance, stuttering issues or visual tearing.

Triple wide support still sucks. I very rarely have my side screens displaying anything these days. I'm really disappointed that Valve still haven't picked up on it as I would imagine it would take almost zero effort for them to officially add UI repositioning code to their source engine. Bad Company 2 still has regular CTDs that only occur in Eyefinity, forcing me to play it in single screen mode for the sake of my sanity. This Eyefinity crash is also present in Medal of Honor beta. The list goes on and on.

P.S. Crossfire is awful in Civ V. It was the same with Settlers 7 this year. Even if you ignored flickery textures it was still a miserable experience. Strategy games show off microstuttering and visual tearing really well as you're constantly panning around maps.

 

[thetruth]

I am glad I really only play one game. Battlefield. At least now I can just get a card that runs it the best and go on. Too damn complicated. This is one reason why people go for the simplicity of a console.

 

[TheBlueChanell]

Maybe we should all just play old games.

 

[43n1m4]

Back in 2006 I bought a Geforce 8800 GTS 640 MB. Then I bought another one for SLI.. and it turned out to be a inconsistent experience - the upgrade path the next year or so went like this: Geforce 8800 Ultra (noisy, high TDP) -> HD3870x2 (same, internal crossfire broke, or drivers broke the crossfire, hard to tell -it was RMA'ed) -> HD3850. Now I have a HD5770 and the bleeding edge of PC GPU hardware is far behind me, moreso SLI or Crossfire. I've come to the conclusion that too much time is spent on optimizing, juggling drivers and fiddle with settings. I don't have time for that anymore. I want to play games with a minimum amount of hassle, and my conclusion for this article seems to be that SLI or Crossfire (still) is too damned erratic for my taste and my life. End of story.

 

[srangara]

The game-specific issues make me wonder how difficult it is to program for SLI/Crossfire. I mean, I can understand that a driver problem could cause a particular game to suffer--assuming it uses a vendor feature other games don't--but an in-game event like meeting a new race?

I hate to think how many cycles are lost trying to support something that seems to break so easily.

 

[Raap]

Well, the solution to all these problems is quite simple; developers making AAA titles need to actually start making games which are also targeted at multi-GPU users. Since there are so few people using it multi-GPUs however, they just can't be bothered. Most of the issues we are seeing with CFX/SLI are problems which should and would have been picked up in development if developers had actually bothered to test it on multi-GPU setups.

There are a few that did, both Crysis and Stalker:CS came with 'native' multi-GPU support I believe, but they are few and far between.

 

[MADOGRE]

Tell it like it is brother, ATI and NV need to get off their butts, as much money as people spend on multi GPU systems the least they can do is give us CF/SLi updates more often.