I have a 6870, is it really worth it for Crossfire for games?

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jordan12

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Ok, so I have one 6870. I have been tempted to look at another 6870 for Crossfire.


But I have always heard that a single video card option is a lot better than 2 in Xfire.

So what are your opinions?
 
MrC4 said:
That's amazing scaling going from a single card 6870 to CF! I am going to give this a try is my 650 watt Corsair can handle it.
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I saw that as well, and thought it was awesome...I just ordered a second one just to run in Crossfire mode...Seems well worth it..
 
It's worth it if you have the space/power to accommodate a second card. I'm running fine on an Antec 650W, the 6870s are rather low power cards overall. The scaling is impressive to say the least, but there are bugs here and there.
 
My opinion is single card over xfire. I ran xfire 6950s with three 1080p displays, so its not like i couldnt use the extra power. While FPS results were great...two cards just did not feel any more fluid or smooth than one. I noticed pretty much zero difference in playability between one and two cards, despite FPS increase. The stuttering and hitching present with 2 cards pretty much cancelled out the FPS gains for me. I now run a single 6950 and dont miss the second one at all.
 
nissanztt90 said:
My opinion is single card over xfire. I ran xfire 6950s with three 1080p displays, so its not like i couldnt use the extra power. While FPS results were great...two cards just did not feel any more fluid or smooth than one. I noticed pretty much zero difference in playability between one and two cards, despite FPS increase. The stuttering and hitching present with 2 cards pretty much cancelled out the FPS gains for me. I now run a single 6950 and dont miss the second one at all.
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Sounds like you were having issues with a specific game not being optimized for crossfire...which is very common for newly released games. For example Witcher 2 has major issues with crossfire but when using a different crossfire profile most of the issues are fixed....ATI is working on this and is supposed to have a fix by the next release. This is one of the trade offs you make when running more complex systems like multi-gpu setups. Its a bit of extra tweaking, but to most of us thats part of the enjoyment that comes with being a PC Hardware enthusiast.
 
Krazypoloc said:
Sounds like you were having issues with a specific game not being optimized for crossfire...which is very common for newly released games. For example Witcher 2 has major issues with crossfire but when using a different crossfire profile most of the issues are fixed....ATI is working on this and is supposed to have a fix by the next release. This is one of the trade offs you make when running more complex systems like multi-gpu setups. Its a bit of extra tweaking, but to most of us thats part of the enjoyment that comes with being a PC Hardware enthusiast.
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I tweaked plenty, played with multiple different driver sets. The FPS gains were there, xfire was working just fine. It was the hitching and stuttering that made xfire not feel as smooth and not worth the extra money, and it wasnt just one game. Ive seen plenty of people on these boards say the exact same thing...two cards just doesnt play as smooth as one, despite FPS gains. The only game i played that may have suffered a profile issue was Portal 2. That game stuttered and hitched more than any other game, and just sucked to play with xfire. I never tried to fix it since i had just decided to take the one card out and water cool the other. 1 watercooled 6950 at 1000mhz > xfire 6950 by far.
 
nissanztt90 said:
I tweaked plenty, played with multiple different driver sets. The FPS gains were there, xfire was working just fine. It was the hitching and stuttering that made xfire not feel as smooth and not worth the extra money, and it wasnt just one game. Ive seen plenty of people on these boards say the exact same thing...two cards just doesnt play as smooth as one, despite FPS gains. The only game i played that may have suffered a profile issue was Portal 2. That game stuttered and hitched more than any other game, and just sucked to play with xfire. I never tried to fix it since i had just decided to take the one card out and water cool the other. 1 watercooled 6950 at 1000mhz > xfire 6950 by far.
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hmm, interesting, I used to have a 4870x2 and had the same issues with some games as you described. When I moved to a single 6950 gameplay was so smooth that i said I would never go for any sort of dual card/dual gpu setup again.

But, I happened to get a 6950 as a gift and was going to sell it, but decided to give xfire a go again. Was expecting it to stutter and hitch, but it didn't, xfire was just so smooth in every game I tried. So I have kept the card and am loving 6950 xfire'd now. Even minimal microstuttering would be annoying for me, but haven't noticed any yet.

That's why I am surprised to hear you had such issues, wonder is it a cpu/psu problem? Plenty of people had stuttering problems with the previous generations of cards, but most people seem to be very happy with any of the 6xxx series in crossfire.
 
I've been running 6850s in crossfire pretty much since they were released and have had almost no problems. No hitching or stuttering or anything like that- not even run into a game thats even had issues running crossfire. I would say its totally worth it (even though I'm only playing at 1920x1080 so far).

Also- your 650W Corsair PSU should be fine with it. The 6870s don't use THAT much more power than the 6850s and my Seasonic x650 is handling it all just fine with some hefty OCs and a fairly loaded system with lots of fans and a few HDDs etc.
 
Flyinfinni said:
I've been running 6850s in crossfire pretty much since they were released and have had almost no problems. No hitching or stuttering or anything like that- not even run into a game thats even had issues running crossfire. I would say its totally worth it (even though I'm only playing at 1920x1080 so far).

Also- your 650W Corsair PSU should be fine with it. The 6870s don't use THAT much more power than the 6850s and my Seasonic x650 is handling it all just fine with some hefty OCs and a fairly loaded system with lots of fans and a few HDDs etc.
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Thanks for the info on the PSU. Looks like I will be adding another 6870 in the next few days.
 
Driver support for new games is pretty poor so you usually have to wait at least a month or deal with ridiculous issues (I'm looking at you, Witcher 2 light blobs). Otherwise CrossFired 6870's are awesome.
 
ATI dual GPU is terrible, driver support sucks, with single 6970 i was fine, with 2 cards i got BSOD at random, always with an ati.sys file or something related to ati. Single card is always best, ati or nvidia, single best gpu is always the best choice.
 
nissanztt90 said:
My opinion is single card over xfire. I ran xfire 6950s with three 1080p displays, so its not like i couldnt use the extra power. While FPS results were great...two cards just did not feel any more fluid or smooth than one. I noticed pretty much zero difference in playability between one and two cards, despite FPS increase. The stuttering and hitching present with 2 cards pretty much cancelled out the FPS gains for me. I now run a single 6950 and dont miss the second one at all.
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Microstutter, I notice it in a few games too. For the most part I've been very pleased with my 6950 crossfire though.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
Microstutter, I notice it in a few games too. For the most part I've been very pleased with my 6950 crossfire though.
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what games? I am really sensitive to microstutter, hate it so much, but I haven't noticed any (yet) with the 6950's in crossfire. Thank god!!
 
gar818 said:
ATI dual GPU is terrible, driver support sucks, with single 6970 i was fine, with 2 cards i got BSOD at random, always with an ati.sys file or something related to ati. Single card is always best, ati or nvidia, single best gpu is always the best choice.
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Sounds like you may have either a bad card or something else screwed up as I've not had any problems like that. You gotta really diagnose problems before you say its terrible- dual GPU support has really improved in the last couple of generations of cards.
 
reaper12 said:
what games? I am really sensitive to microstutter, hate it so much, but I haven't noticed any (yet) with the 6950's in crossfire. Thank god!!
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I noticed it in Metro and Crysis. Those are the only games where I noticed it but those are also the only games where I would really need crossfire to run the settings that I do.

I used the microstutter program with Metro and posted my results here.

Flyinfinni said:
Sounds like you may have either a bad card or something else screwed up as I've not had any problems like that. You gotta really diagnose problems before you say its terrible- dual GPU support has really improved in the last couple of generations of cards.
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He used to troll the XS news section about how much that he hated his 4870x2 too, got banned for a while too iirc. I haven't had any stability issues with my 6950 crossfire setup either.
 
I bounce between both Nvidia and ATI cards after a few rounds. Last round with my 5870's running in Crossfire, the scalability was really lacking with the 11.x drivers. Hence I moved to 2 x 580 GTX's.
 
I've had pretty good luck with my 6870s crossfired. Of course there's always a game or two that don't utilize it for jack or having to wait for a driver update. If you already have one card and your PSU can handle it then I say go for it.
 
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