• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Crossfire vs. SLI

samuelmorris said:
Let's start seeing some relevant examples then. Again, I did state 85%+, not 100%. You'll have to come up with an impressive list to prove what I said wrong.
Click to expand...

I actually kept a list of about 70ish games I played over the course of a year or so when I got my xfire / eyefinity setup just to keep track of crossfire / eyefinity compatibility. I'm not at home so I can't see the list from here, but my overall experience with crossfire compatibility was very hit or miss. Yea the games that websites will benchmark obviously work (and there are certainly incentives for nvidia/AMD to make damn sure that the popular benchmarked games work well). Googling for most of these games that didn't work returned results of "this game does not work with xfire/SLI". I think the worst part of my experience is that if it didn't work, then running with 2 cards was actually worse than turning xfire off. It wouldn't be as big a deal if I could just leave xfire on and not take a performance hit from negative scaling. This makes the whole process of running a new game that much more painful... having to check for compatibility and then turning xfire off if it wasn't compatible.
 
Negative scaling is rarely an issue any more.
You're also using hd5870s, which were far less reliable in crossfire than either the HD4 or HD6 series are.
Still waiting on those examples...
 
Both technologies work fine.

With your budget and resolution I would grab the best single card you can afford and be happy.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
Give me 3 more hours at work?

HD5800's scaled worse than the 6000's, but this isn't about scaling. The games that didn't work with xfire didn't work with it period regardless of 6000's or 4000's.
Click to expand...

Perhaps, but if scaling is sufficiently bad it leads you to think crossfire isn't working, scaling isn't wholly irrelevant.
 
So here's my 'list'. Out of the 74 games I kept track of, 50 of them were after I got my 2nd card so I documented xfire compatibility only for those 50 games. Out of the 50 games, 19 games had no scaling or negative scaling. They are: Blur, Conflict Denied Ops, Darksiders, Deathspank, Divinity 2, Fuel, Madballs in Babo, Mount and Blade, Mount and Blade Warband, Nail'd, Ninja Blade, TDU, TDU2, Titan Quest/Titan Quest Immortal Throne, Trackmania, Two Worlds, Vindictus, Combat Arms, Dragon Nest (I suspect most of the Korean MMO's will have issues...)

So 38% of the games I tried simply had no crossfire support and they weren't "pre-windows xp" games. This doesn't count 'poor scaling' games.
 
Crossfire wins in every scenario currently or in the future. Crossfire is so good that it automatically fixes other problems in your computer without even informing you its taking action. Crossfire also acts as a Firewall and utilizes the shaders to create a virtual NIC all while simultaneously plugging your Ethernet cord or wireless adapter into one of the mini display ports.

Ok moving on from fanboydom, I feel as if they are both relativly equal. The metric upon which they are measured changes the moment a new game is released. Since this is the reality we have to deal with I believe that we should expect moments where AMD drops the ball on a particular title as well as Nvidia. Game development is too complex and costly for every title to scale at some incredible number. This lowest common denominator approach is the best we can expect until some sort of hardware mGPU revolution takes place.
Until then every opinion you hear on this forum, or any other for that matter, will just be an opinion and nothing more.
 
{NG}Fidel said:
Crossfire wins in every scenario currently or in the future. Crossfire is so good that it automatically fixes other problems in your computer without even informing you its taking action. Crossfire also acts as a Firewall and utilizes the shaders to create a virtual NIC all while simultaneously plugging your Ethernet cord or wireless adapter into one of the mini display ports.
Click to expand...

I literally LOL'd
 
I think it's more a question of driver team resources and developer input. These days quality control is shoddy, perhaps because there is so much to test, so rarer cases like CF and Eyefinity/Surround don't get the resources they need from either the GPU driver team or the developer of the game. Both of these should really be working on the game at release for the vast majority, and I could excuse only problems with obscure setups.

If you're going to release a high end graphical game like DXHR and call it a "gaming evolved" game with Eyefinity support and native 3D, shoudn't you make sure those work as expected on release? CF has hardly worked at all in the game, 3D effects have been tested as mild at best and Eyefinity users have had a lot of problems with the HUD not centering. Also SSAO is bugged on my rig at least, nevermind the stutter problems everyone (even single GPU users) still have. AMD and Nixxes just haven't been able to do the job properly. If you can't get stuff working on your highly marketed and sponsored game, should I expect that other games would work any better?
 
As it happens, CAP4 finally adds reasonable crossfire support to the game. It's not wonderful, but in a large number of sections it's 60%+, 90% in a fair few areas. There are just certain sections where you get no crossfire scaling.
 
As of just the last couple of months, it seems like half of the driver team at AMD has been on vacation or something and it's maddening.

First Dead Island was released, it was a piece of shit anyway from alot of aspects. I mean we had to rely on guys at widescreengamingforum to fix menu and HUD issues for multimonitor.....not really AMDs fault, but CF wasn't available until just now, what three months later?

DeusEx had problems and it was/is an AMD highlight.

Rage.....regardless of how you feel........AMD released some totally fucked driver package on day one, and still hasn't released a CF profile......I doubt they ever will, the game was so poorly received.

BF3 took what.....three betas and the first CF profile borked the game......that and CAP4 was first released on Rage3d.........I mean really? I go to Rage3d before I check out the AMD website anymore.....what's up with that?

Great hardware....poor driver support.....:mad:
 
It's pretty normal around this time of year, AMD have a very small driver team, I don't imagine it's more than about half a dozen people, and at this time of year they can't keep up with the flurry of new releases. For BF3 to have a means of using crossfire at the time of the game's launch is pretty good going by normal standards. You can't really blame AMD for Rage because nvidia can't get SLI working for it either. It's just Dead Island and Deus Ex that AMD fell down on.
 
AMD should hire more people into their driver team, this sort of craptastic driver situation isn't exactly enticing people to buy Radeons. On the other if Nvidia is equally bad then I guess we're screwed and should go out and buy a console...

Out of the games I play currently,

BF3 got a "working" good profile within release. The game still likes to crash especially when I change resolutions in the menu. Also I noticed some visual artifacts during multiplayer. Overall though the scaling is one of the best I've seen and there's only little stutter at 1080p. Can't say the same of Eyefinity resolutions. Also AA takes a hard hit on performance.

DXHR and Missing link has weak scaling <40%, even with the latest CAP4. Also the game has had a lot of problems with stutters, not just microstuttering. At launch it also had some visual artifacts in CF. SSAO doesn't work properly for me and tanks performance near objects.

Dead Island, I haven't even tested CF yet cause it wasn't working...

RAGE doesn't support CF

Crysis 2: works good at 1080p, stutters in eyefinity

Hard Reset: CF scaling is weak.

Metro 2033: Scaling works great at 1080p, but CF stutters a lot in eyefinity.

GTAIV: I just tried this, it didn't even let change GPU settings with CF on, let alone start the game...

Shogun II: Works good, as it fucking should as a Gaming Evolved game. The game itself though was buggy as hell for months after release.
 
General Lee said:
Out of the games I play currently,

BF3 got a "working" good profile within release. The game still likes to crash especially when I change resolutions in the menu. Also I noticed some visual artifacts during multiplayer. Overall though the scaling is one of the best I've seen and there's only little stutter at 1080p. Can't say the same of Eyefinity resolutions. Also AA takes a hard hit on performance.

DXHR and Missing link has weak scaling <40%, even with the latest CAP4. Also the game has had a lot of problems with stutters, not just microstuttering. At launch it also had some visual artifacts in CF. SSAO doesn't work properly for me and tanks performance near objects.

Dead Island, I haven't even tested CF yet cause it wasn't working...

RAGE doesn't support CF

Crysis 2: works good at 1080p, stutters in eyefinity

Hard Reset: CF scaling is weak.

Metro 2033: Scaling works great at 1080p, but CF stutters a lot in eyefinity.

GTAIV: I just tried this, it didn't even let change GPU settings with CF on, let alone start the game...

Shogun II: Works good, as it fucking should as a Gaming Evolved game. The game itself though was buggy as hell for months after release.
Click to expand...

Yikes you should start a thread about this because there are fixes to some of these issues.

Battlefield 3 (game crashing is game issue not AMD or nvidia issue)

DXHR (Scaling sucks partially because it's an old engine and doesn't seem to stress the GPU enough much like Dead Space 2) You see more crossfire scaling and workload on the gpu's in higher resolutions like eyefinity with higher IQ added.

Dead Island, I haven't even tested CF yet cause it wasn't working... (fixed since Cap 4 recently from posts I've read on other forums)

RAGE doesn't support CF (keep in mind that it doesn't support SLi either so game developer fault)

Crysis 2: works good at 1080p, stutters in eyefinity

Didn't have that much of an issue but haven't played it since DX 11 patch and high res texture pack came out.

Hard Reset: CF scaling is weak.

I doubled my performance in Hard Reset Demo eyefinity, not sure what your experiencing here.

Metro 2033: Scaling works great at 1080p, but CF stutters a lot in eyefinity.

Only reason I stuttered is cause the game is so demanding. I lowered to AAA instead of 4x AA and it ran okay, didn't notice any stuttering.

GTAIV: I just tried this, it didn't even let change GPU settings with CF on, let alone start the game...

There is a easy fix for this and this is a game bug. The game reads your vram like if it's 4GB as supposed to 2GB. You need to add a command to the executable that says something like limitvideomem -.50 (look it up for the actual command) Settings are then tweakable and game runs about as fine as a piss poor optimized game can run.
 
samuelmorris said:
It's pretty normal around this time of year, AMD have a very small driver team, I don't imagine it's more than about half a dozen people, and at this time of year they can't keep up with the flurry of new releases. For BF3 to have a means of using crossfire at the time of the game's launch is pretty good going by normal standards. You can't really blame AMD for Rage because nvidia can't get SLI working for it either. It's just Dead Island and Deus Ex that AMD fell down on.
Click to expand...

That's just fucking weak......

look, we pay up the ass for these products, hire some guys to program drivers or GTFO.:mad:
 
Battlefield 3 (game crashing is game issue not AMD or nvidia issue)
Click to expand...

Crashing at changing graphics settings points out to driver malfunction. Also this was mentioned by Tom's Hardware reviewer who didn't get any problems with SLI.
DXHR (Scaling sucks partially because it's an old engine and doesn't seem to stress the GPU enough much like Dead Space 2) You see more crossfire scaling and workload on the gpu's in higher resolutions like eyefinity with higher IQ added.
Click to expand...

Scaling in eyefinity wasn't any better than at 1080p unfortunately. There was no problems with GPU workload though.

RAGE doesn't support CF (keep in mind that it doesn't support SLi either so game developer fault)
Click to expand...
Regardless it sucks at eyefinity resolutions where the FPS drops low with just single GPU. So it's a negative for CF (and SLI).

I doubled my performance in Hard Reset Demo eyefinity, not sure what your experiencing here.
Click to expand...
http://www.techspot.com/review/440-hard-reset-performance-test/page5.html
<40% scaling

Only reason I stuttered is cause the game is so demanding. I lowered to AAA instead of 4x AA and it ran okay, didn't notice any stuttering.
Click to expand...
with Eyefinity? Send me a fraps frametime log of a 5760x1080 run and I'll believe you. ;)

There is a easy fix for this and this is a game bug. The game reads your vram like if it's 4GB as supposed to 2GB. You need to add a command to the executable that says something like limitvideomem -.50 (look it up for the actual command) Settings are then tweakable and game runs about as fine as a piss poor optimized game can run.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll take a look!
 
I disagree that DEHR is an old game that doesn't use GPUs much like dead space. Even with 20-40% GPU scaling the frame rate drops down to the 40s at 2560x1600 routinely, occasionally down to 35. Considering the game only uses FXAA instead of MSAA, it's actually reasonably demanding. Compared to Dead Space 2, much moreso.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top