"x2" cards - treated as single or multi-GPUs?

[UltimaBoB]

Are cards like the 7950x2 or HD 3870x2 subject to the same issues as SLI/Crossfire set-ups?

My understanding is that they might take up less space and be a little more user friendly - no crossfire bridging cable etc....

But do they have the same issues with scaling, needing SLI profiles or crossfire profiles, only adding power on some games etc...?

Is a HD 3870x2 going to be faster than say an 8800Ultra in all games and resoultions?

 

[Chris_B]

From what we've read its identified as a single card and physically IS a single card but needs crossfire profiles in the drivers etc to make use of both cores.

Its unlikely its gonna be faster than the ultra in ALL games but id say if ati get their shit together and bring out some good driver sets id say it can at least best it in quite a lot of the games out there.

 

[Sr7]

As Chris said, since it's still using Crossfire, it's subject to all the Crossfire oddities/issues (just as the NVIDIA GX2 is based on SLI).

One way this is actually worse than 2 3870's is that you can't disable the crossfire, so it's basically a black-box... you won't even know if ATI puts in a profile to only use 1 GPU due to some corruption issue they may have with multi-gpu.

So you may be humming along thinking you're getting 2 GPU performance when you only have 1.

This is just theory though, so I don't mean to start any unbased accusations here... but you wouldn't know if this is happening unless you had a 3870 to compare your X2 performance to.