SLI VS CF...no benchmarks!

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SystematicDestroyer

Weaksauce
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OK for the upper end SLI/CF users...not the ultra-high-end (the 2xGTX280 multiple grand beast)...who wins?

I have yet to see 2x GTX260 SLI VS 2x 4870 CF benchmarks anywhere! This would very interesting...everyone should be considering this, as with both of these cards that is a very powerful solution for a reasonable price. I don't think it would be fully utilized right now, but it could be a great solution in the future when more games can utilize that power.

Has anyone see any SLI GTX260 VS CF 4870 benchmarks?
 
Patience. Kyle has already stated [H] will cover the CF benches when the drivers are ready. Since they aren't yet (but will be in a few weeks when the X2 is released), you'll have to wait for those benchmarks. Just like everyone else.
 
Aren't the 260s still supposed to MSRP at 450? I don't know if I'd call 900 bucks still within the "reasonable" category
 
Nicolaskl said:
Aren't the 260s still supposed to MSRP at 450? I don't know if I'd call 900 bucks still within the "reasonable" category
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Naw, they were always to be MSRPed at $400. They are currently on Newegg for $399.99. Still, SLIing those two would be beastly performance!
 
pandora's box said:
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14990/9

4850 crossfire is the best bang for buck right now. hangs right up there with 4870 crossfire but for a considerable amount less. got 2 hd4850's for $300 myself.
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Aye, the only reason I refuse to go with 2 lowballers to beat out the high ballers is because of scaling. CF and SLI both have scaling problems, and games/applications which don't scale well are going to be gimped by a single 4850 at 24" resolution.
 
Xfire is a crapshoot, sometimes is scales 5%, sometimes it scales almost perfectly 100% and anywhere in between. Im not sure I like the inconsistency but 4870 xfire made sense this round :p
 
Paro said:
$800 is 2 whole new Dell computers, lol
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Dude, you're getting a Dell :p

I agree though, $800 isn't exactly what I would call "reasonable", and you may need a new PSU and/or motherboard to use them which quickly brings you near $1000. Still it would be interesting to see some benchmarks (I suppose you could look at the 280SLI results and just assume the 260SLI will be a bit slower)

The problem is some games don't support CF/SLI so then you are left with basically 1 video card for certain games, which IMO would suck having paid $800.
 
Indeed 4870 CrossFire does seem like a waste with the 4850's running so cheap (looking at the TechReport article). I might have to CrossFire my 4850 just to not feel so bad about skipping out on the 4870.

Seeing those results makes me feel better about it.
$300 vs $600 for about the same performance... Biggest hit was 90 fps vs 60 fps which doesn't mean much anyway. They were about tied in Crysis which was surprising.

[edit]
Why do we care about current 260 prices?
It's clearly too expensive -- the 4870 beats it almost always and is running significantly cheaper. Until the 260 meets or beats the 4870 price, it's an obsolete card.
 
UtopiA said:
Indeed 4870 CrossFire does seem like a waste with the 4850's running so cheap (looking at the TechReport article). I might have to CrossFire my 4850 just to not feel so bad about skipping out on the 4870.

Seeing those results makes me feel better about it.
$300 vs $600 for about the same performance... Biggest hit was 90 fps vs 60 fps which doesn't mean much anyway. They were about tied in Crysis which was surprising.

[edit]
Why do we care about current 260 prices?
It's clearly too expensive -- the 4870 beats it almost always and is running significantly cheaper. Until the 260 meets or beats the 4870 price, it's an obsolete card.
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Where are people getting the 4870 beats the GTX260? It does on a few benchmarks, but nearly all remarks at the end of reviews comment that the 4870 is close to the GTX260 and beats it on a few benchmarks.

[H] - "We were surprised to see the Radeon HD 4870 competing well against the GeForce GTX 260. It not only matched the gameplay experience, but in Assassin’s Creed it edged out with faster framerates too. Count on drivers to mature in both camps as well." Also, this game got killed in AoC.

FiringSquad - "...in fact the board often comes close to, or eclipses the GeForce GTX 260 in performance..." Referring to the 4870.

Anandtech - "..."it depends on the benchmark you care about," but in our testing we definitely saw this $300 part perform at the level of NVIDIA's $400 GT200 variant, the GTX 260." Not beat, perform at the level of...this is the most 4870 leaned one of all.

PC Perspective - "When comparing it to the NVIDIA product stack, the HD 4870 is easily beating out the new 55nm 9800 GTX+ product and is in fact nearly rivaling the new GTX 260 in many instances."

If money were no object, the GTX260 would beat the 4870. But if money were no object, the GTX280 would smoke them both!
 
SystematicDestroyer said:
Where are people getting the 4870 beats the GTX260? It does on a few benchmarks, but nearly all remarks at the end of reviews comment that the 4870 is close to the GTX260 and beats it on a few benchmarks.
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Based on anandtech's numbers:

Crysis
-----------
1280x1024--4% faster
1680x1050--7% faster
1920x1200--4% faster

COD4
-----------
1680x1050--17% faster
1920x1200--11% faster
2560x1600--1% slower

Enemy Territory
-----------
1680x1050--18% faster
1920x1200--15% faster
2560x1600--5% faster

Assassin's Creed
-----------
1680x1050--5% faster
1920x1200--10% faster
2560x1600--11% faster

The Witcher
------------
1680x1050--11% faster
1920x1200--4% faster
2560x1600--2% slower

Bioshock
------------
1680x1050--28% faster
1920x1200--56% faster
2560x1600--39% faster

Oblivion
-------------
1680x1050--1% slower
1920x1200--4% slower
2560x1600--16% slower

It's still very close, but it's easy to see why people think it beats the 260, esp since most people are factoring price into the equation. I'd say they are about even though, when you take all the different reviews/benchmarks from different sites into account. Firing Squad for example puts the 260 ahead of the 4870 in COD4, while tech-report and anandtech put the 4870 ahead :confused:
 
SystematicDestroyer said:
Where are people getting the 4870 beats the GTX260? It does on a few benchmarks, but nearly all remarks at the end of reviews comment that the 4870 is close to the GTX260 and beats it on a few benchmarks.
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Until you max out the eye candy and realize that a 4870 can be faster than a GF280 card
 
It's going to be interesting to see if my upcoming dual-4870 setup will outdo my friend's 9800GTX Tri-SLI setup (I'm guessing yes).

Of course, now all this makes my current 3870X2 virtually worthless. :(
 
Why would someone tri-sli the 9800GTX when they knew the 4800's were coming so soon?
:(
 
GuruX said:
It's going to be interesting to see if my upcoming dual-4870 setup will outdo my friend's 9800GTX Tri-SLI setup (I'm guessing yes).

Of course, now all this makes my current 3870X2 virtually worthless. :(
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Sell it on Ebay.
 
nobody_here said:
i have also seen some games where 4870 CF is barely able to keep up with the 280....and this is at very high rez/details
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Every test I've seen like that, the CF was functionally broken and either getting a couple percent more or even a couple percent less. Are there tests that aren't like that?

Some CF has been scaling perfectly, at 100%. Some has been at negative 10 percent. Depends on the game. I doubt that it is going to stay that way. I think even if ATi has to go through game by game and fix the CF one case at a time it still wouldn't be that big of a deal. I could be wrong. But if I'm right, and they can get even a steady 50% increase in CF, that would mean the 280 will get ass whooped in virtually everything.

Someone said that the new CF functionally shares the memory, rather than duplicating the memory like SLI does. Which would mean that by CFing you'd not only be doubling your processing power, you'd be doubling your memory, which could be enormous in terms of gains, especially at high res. Anyone confirm or deny this? It sounded a little bit like wishful thinking, but...
 
Nicolaskl said:
But if I'm right, and they can get even a steady 50% increase in CF, that would mean the 280 will get ass whooped in virtually everything.
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at which point you should compare 280 SLI to 4870 CF, at which point things change quite a bit
 
Nicolaskl said:
Every test I've seen like that, the CF was functionally broken and either getting a couple percent more or even a couple percent less. Are there tests that aren't like that?

Some CF has been scaling perfectly, at 100%. Some has been at negative 10 percent. Depends on the game. I doubt that it is going to stay that way. I think even if ATi has to go through game by game and fix the CF one case at a time it still wouldn't be that big of a deal. I could be wrong. But if I'm right, and they can get even a steady 50% increase in CF, that would mean the 280 will get ass whooped in virtually everything.

Someone said that the new CF functionally shares the memory, rather than duplicating the memory like SLI does. Which would mean that by CFing you'd not only be doubling your processing power, you'd be doubling your memory, which could be enormous in terms of gains, especially at high res. Anyone confirm or deny this? It sounded a little bit like wishful thinking, but...
Click to expand...

That will only apply to the X2 as GDDR5 has this new feature that allows RAM sharing. That's what the CF port on the GPU architecture pics are for. It's not used in card to card CF though.

I'm not even sure if this new tech should be called CrossFire since it's fundamentally different to all existing multi-GPU tech.
 
nobody_here said:
at which point you should compare 280 SLI to 4870 CF, at which point things change quite a bit
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Why?

$600 buys you two 4870s.
$650 buys you one 280.

That's a fair comparison. SLI 280s runs you $1200-1300. How does it make sense to compare that to a $600 solution?
 
truffle00 said:
Why?

$600 buys you two 4870s.
$650 buys you one 280.

That's a fair comparison. SLI 280s runs you $1200-1300. How does it make sense to compare that to a $600 solution?
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Agreed, however the price gap is going to shrink, its only a matter of time as nVidia has no choice and it is just interesting to see how well they scale. Overall it looks like GTX 280/260 is scaling better than 4870 CF. In fact what's really odd is that FiringSquad has 4850 CF scaling better than 4870 CF.
 
Can't wait to see Nvidia's pricing response.
:)

They'll have to do better than a 9800GTX cut and a 9800GTX+ of course.
 
al3x3y said:
i would CF 2x4870.its up to you.
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You have a good point there, but the heat is too much! At load I think the heat would be comparable...but idle, OMG hot. Plus with the heat, not sure how much OCing I'd be doing on a 4870 VS OCing on a GTX260 (which supposedly OCs very well).
 
truffle00 said:
Why?

$600 buys you two 4870s.
$650 buys you one 280.

That's a fair comparison. SLI 280s runs you $1200-1300. How does it make sense to compare that to a $600 solution?
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because not everybody is looking at price alone or even cares about what it costs......people pay for extreme edition CPU's even though they could cheap out and get a cheaper one and overclock it right? same difference....

i am looking at it purely from a GPU to GPU standpoint, if you are going to compare two 4870's CF'd together against one single 280 GTX card and call it a victory, consider that empty, show me a 4870CF setup beating out a 280 GTX SLI setup and then you can claim victory...see what i am saying?
 
nobody_here said:
because not everybody is looking at price alone or even cares about what it costs......people pay for extreme edition CPU's even though they could cheap out and get a cheaper one and overclock it right? same difference....

i am looking at it purely from a GPU to GPU standpoint, if you are going to compare two 4870's CF'd together against one single 280 GTX card and call it a victory, consider that empty, show me a 4870CF setup beating out a 280 GTX SLI setup and then you can claim victory...see what i am saying?
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Well if u want to compare GPU to GPU then anyone could have told u that Nvidia would be the better, as ATI had made it well known that they were going to go for a cheaper GPU design.

I do partially share your view. I feel that a comparison between 2 4870's in Xfire and a single 280 is not a very good one. BUT, I would consider 4870x2 vs. 280 a very interesting comparison-- mostly because a lot of people, like me, don't have 2-card Xfire as an option.

The 4870x2 is a single card with 2 GPU's on it, yes, but it is still one piece of silicon. u have to keep in mind that this was ATI's strategy to compete with Nvidia's huge GPU route.
 
gorilla show said:
Well if u want to compare GPU to GPU then anyone could have told u that Nvidia would be the better, as ATI had made it well known that they were going to go for a cheaper GPU design.

I do partially share your view. I feel that a comparison between 2 4870's in Xfire and a single 280 is not a very good one. BUT, I would consider 4870x2 vs. 280 a very interesting comparison-- mostly because a lot of people, like me, don't have 2-card Xfire as an option.

The 4870x2 is a single card with 2 GPU's on it, yes, but it is still one piece of silicon. u have to keep in mind that this was ATI's strategy to compete with Nvidia's huge GPU route.
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oh trust me, from a price standpoint, i would buy the ATI parts any day if i were in a position looking for an upgrade and given those options

NV really has been forced to drop prices, and a lot....or be left with inventory for years, but given the yields....i wonder...and the whole Physx factor still has to weigh in i think before a solid purchasing decision can be made ;)
 
nobody_here said:
oh trust me, from a price standpoint, i would buy the ATI parts any day if i were in a position looking for an upgrade and given those options

NV really has been forced to drop prices, and a lot....or be left with inventory for years, but given the yields....i wonder...and the whole Physx factor still has to weigh in i think before a solid purchasing decision can be made ;)
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Yup, good thing I don't REALLY have to make a decision anytime soon-- there are no games, aside from crysis, that make my 8800gts sweat too much. :D
 
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