Question... SLi vs. CrossFire

[nirvana175]

Hi everyone!! I have a question that has been burning on my mind since CrossFire was announced a long time ago... and that THG didn't even mentioned in their article... Well, in reality, I got two questions:

1. Is it true that only *some* games (namely, the most recent or famous) are supported by SLi?

2. Is it true that CrossFire distributes workloads between GPUs in all and every game that uses Direct3D and OpenGL?

I'm asking this because I normally play a lot of old games (some even dating back from the nineties), some of them unknown or obscure, in addition to new games, but they all have support for the D3D and OGL APIs. So, what's your opinion on this? I plan on upgrading, but I'll only buy that setup that lets me play my old 3d accelerated games as fast as possible.

Thanks in advance, and have a nice weekend!

 

[I-am-crazy]

is you play games from at least 2 years old, you would have enouf with the cheapest card avaible...

and SLI or CF setup is an absolute waste of money then...

 

[nirvana175]

is you play games from at least 2 years old, you would have enouf with the cheapest card avaible...

and SLI or CF setup is an absolute waste of money then...

Let's say that I want to play Halo, but also Splinter Cell 1, Earth 2150, and some other games before 2000 at 1600x1200 at the highest quality (FSAA+AF), but also want to play more recent games like Doom3 and UT2K4.... the whole point is... which one of the two setups brings the most benefit for a user like me who plays games from various years but still wants to see all of them at their best quality?

 

[nirvana175]

Well, thanks for the feedback, I think I got my answer now.

It's a fact that CrossFire supports ALL the applications and games that use Direct3D and OpenGL (even potentially 3D applications like 3dsmax and others, since they also use those APIs!!).

nvidia, in the other hand... I've checked also the nvidia SLi Zone and they say that SLi in fact can do FSAA to all the games (must really mean "direct3d" and/or opengl games) using a generic profile. I think that the details are very vague, and the answer seems to be some kind of "me-too" attitude towards ATi's CF. SLi can only do FSAA to unsupported games, not AF nor graphic workload balancing between the cards. Or do they? I can't tell for sure since no one over the web seems to have verified this, no tests, and there's no specific info on nvidia's site, so I guess the answer is a straight NO.

I hope that this little investigation is useful for everyone, specially those of us interested in playing oldies-but-goodies kind of games.

See you.