HD 4870 crossfire, or no?

R

runLoganrun

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Jul 4, 2005
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well, i have been dying to throw another 512 4870 into my system for a while now, and just had the opportunity to pick one up, and it's not even arrived yet, but i'm kinda getting buyer's remorse. like i just got a bunch of current games that i've been wanting to play, like fallout 3, bioshock, farcry 2, GRID, and prince of persia, the last two not being too graphically demanding probably, but GRID looks Awesome, great game, but anyway I can play all these games completely maxed out settings, at 1920x1080, and capping out at 60fps. the one game i have that would benefit would be crysis, and now crysis warhead, i believe this would allow me to play them on very high at 1920x1080, although crysis strangely doesn't have that resolution available, i could have sworn it did, but i just reinstalled the game and the highest is something unusual, like 1780x1000, not sure exactly.

but to the point, aside from a little boost, or maybe a big boost in crysis, i don't see any benefit to having another card in there, my single 4870 plays everything flawlessly, or am i wrong, i don't see how it could possibly benefit any of the non-crysis games, so as cool a toy as it is, on a practicality level, i don't see getting much out of it.

any feedback on this? any point to crossfire 4870 (aside from crysis) (and benchmarking)? i'm sure they'll be games coming out that could use it, more crysis type games, but for now if it's not going to be useful to me, i'm just going to return it.

thanks for any replies to my quandary,
rlr
 
dual 4870 512's at 1900res will likely get you all gamer/high plus 16x aniso in crysis/warhead.
 
i thought for high resolutions like 1920x1080, a 1GB card would benefit more.
 
rennyf77 said:
dual 4870 512's at 1900res will likely get you all gamer/high plus 16x aniso in crysis/warhead.
Click to expand...

when you put it that way....
it does sound pretty bad ass. i wish there were more games like that though, like how many times can you play crysis, is suppose online you could for a while, i haven't checked that out yet though. so with all the other games it does seem kinda pointless, i did already order the thing though, it was kind of a late night impulse buy, lol, but i bet once i get my fingers on it, it will be hard to let go of.
 
I have a 4870x2 and a core i7. Crysis warhead still doesn't play smoothly throughout the whole game on all gamer settings or enthusiast. The funny part is the best looking parts of crysis runs the smoothest (40 fps and up). The terrible looking parts run terribly. It's just weird.
 
I am Planning on the same set up, as of now teamed up with a 4850 I must say it runs pretty good so I would imagine another 4870 would run even better. I will only be using 1920 res. for movies gaming at 1680 x 1050 so I think i would be fine, If you are planning on gaming at higher than that it is my understanding you should go with 1gb cards.
 
try it and then return it if you dont see enough of a benchmark increase

1gb cards bench better at higher resolutions but the cost of 2 for selling 1 512 would be prohibitive, and think at your res there wonould not be that much difference, more of a 30" thing

2x 512mb 4870s are great. I run crysis all very high, and on COD5 the frames are capped at 91fps for some reason (maybe a cat thing), never dip though
 
rennyf77 said:
dual 4870 512's at 1900res will likely get you all gamer/high plus 16x aniso in crysis/warhead.
Click to expand...

I got the card and decided to check it out, hard not to. i played crysis since that's the only place i see there being any benefit, but then actually i read somewhere else that crysis wasn't optimized for crossfire. my results were mediocre, i didn't do any actual benchmarks, and i put the game on very high, it played about the same it was playing for me with 1 card set to high, occasionally choppy, and struggling to stay at 30fps. i suppose i could have put it back down to high, and cranked up the AA some, but i was getting lots of shimmery effects too which i was able to improve but not fix, probably could've with more tweaking, that was my first crossfire setup. so at this point i'm not exactly blown away, it would be cool to have and would certainly be good for future games, but right at the moment it doesn't do that much for me, with the marginal improvement in crysis and none in other, new, games i have which are already maxed out and look great with one card. they're not as detailed as crysis, but they look as good as they possibly can. I think when you read benchmarks on things like this it's easy to get swayed by the staggering results of some setups, but the fact is, in real world situations, anything over 60fps isn't possible to see a difference in, so getting 180fps in bioshock isn't going to make any difference in actual gameplay, it's just about getting the best benchmarks, which is all well and good, if benchmarking is what you want to do. personally it doesn't matter that much to me, i just want to play my games smoothly at max settings, beyond that just seems like a waste of money. unfortunately don't know if they'll take a straight return on it, since i opened it, i got it at the egg.

please post if you had a similar, or different experience,
rlr
 
runLoganrun said:
I got the card and decided to check it out, hard not to. i played crysis since that's the only place i see there being any benefit, but then actually i read somewhere else that crysis wasn't optimized for crossfire. my results were mediocre, i didn't do any actual benchmarks, and i put the game on very high, it played about the same it was playing for me with 1 card set to high, occasionally choppy, and struggling to stay at 30fps. i suppose i could have put it back down to high, and cranked up the AA some, but i was getting lots of shimmery effects too which i was able to improve but not fix, probably could've with more tweaking, that was my first crossfire setup. so at this point i'm not exactly blown away, it would be cool to have and would certainly be good for future games, but right at the moment it doesn't do that much for me, with the marginal improvement in crysis and none in other, new, games i have which are already maxed out and look great with one card. they're not as detailed as crysis, but they look as good as they possibly can. I think when you read benchmarks on things like this it's easy to get swayed by the staggering results of some setups, but the fact is, in real world situations, anything over 60fps isn't possible to see a difference in, so getting 180fps in bioshock isn't going to make any difference in actual gameplay, it's just about getting the best benchmarks, which is all well and good, if benchmarking is what you want to do. personally it doesn't matter that much to me, i just want to play my games smoothly at max settings, beyond that just seems like a waste of money. unfortunately don't know if they'll take a straight return on it, since i opened it, i got it at the egg.

please post if you had a similar, or different experience,
rlr
Click to expand...

Thanks for this post.

I have a really similar system as you and also game at 1920x1200, except the 4870 I have is the 1GB version (from xmas). I'm heading back to school today and will throw it in to try it out, but in the back of my mind I had been wondering whether I should save a bit more money to get a second card. Your post helped confirm that no, I really won't need a second one for the time being (with the games that are out right now). Crazy frames in Crysis is a cool thing to think about, but there are only so many replays of that game that one can do.
 
Ive got a QX9650 running at 4.5 ghz, an over clocked 4870x2 and Im not even close to maxing out Crysis. I wonder when a machine will be able to?
 
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