crossfire versus sli

RichPLS

Champion
They both have strenghts and weaknesses...
Both are sufficient, right now it seems CF has the advantage... not just in speed but also in features...
[/flips coin]
 
The only thing about CF is that the scaling of adding a 2nd card is not always impressive, sometimes limited to 20%, where at least with SLI, you can typically expect a 60-80% framerate jump....

Currently, a single 1900XT rocks!!!!
 

RichPLS

Champion
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2541

PC Format, UK
"PC Format says: “For stability and ease of use, ATI looks to have the edge.”

“…it should deliver on ATI’s near-universal out of the box performance boost over a single card promise."


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Bernhard Haluschak, Tecchannel.de, Germany
"The manufacturer is demonstrating the superiority of the CrossFire-2-graphics cards-solution compared with Nvidia’s SLI-technology."


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Francesco Ferrari – PC Magazine -Italia
"The advantage for users choosing the ATI solution is not only the performance increase, but better image quality too."

"We wait for the test, but if our benchmark will confirm what ATI says, it’s a tough battle ahead for nVidia SLI solutions."


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Julien Jay, Clubic.com
" In terms of performance, ATI is able to reach a 60% advantage vis-a-vis an SLI system with two Ultra GeForce 6800 cards."


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AnandTech.com
"Even at this early of a stage, performance and stability were both impressive. The system we were running had just been assembled hours earlier and didn't crash at all during our testing. In fact, the system was so new that the motherboard manufacturer who let us test with their hardware hadn't even seen it running - it was their first time as well as ours."

"The performance of the solution was equally impressive; at 1024x768 the dual GPU CrossFire setup improved performance by 49%. At 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 the performance went up by 72% and 86% respectively. We had our doubts that ATI would be able to offer performance scaling on par with what we've seen on NVIDIA's SLI but these initial numbers, despite being run on early hardware/drivers, are quite promising."

also

HotHardware.com
In any case this, in our opinion, is a huge selling point for CrossFire. While NVIDIA's Driver Team is doing a fairly good job of enabling SLI for many current and new titles, the list of supported games isn't exhaustive, as it is with ATi's new multi-GPU technology.
 

RichPLS

Champion
ATI’s solution is a bit more tolerable, price wise. Radeon X1900 XT cards are typically less expensive and more widely available compared to the (difficult to obtain) GeForce 7800 512 MB cards. In addition, Radeon Xpress 200 Crossfire motherboards can be found at price points nearing $100, whereas nForce4 SLI boards are typically $150 and above (although there are a few low-cost exceptions).

Both cards have titles which they perform better in, although looking over the benchmarks, although it appears that ATI’s cards can push better performance on newer, exceptionally shader heavy titles like FEAR, although in other situations, nVidia’s GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB cards will deliver slightly better all performance. While we were originally disappointed that ATI didn’t launch their Crossfire solution with XTX-class clock speeds, our overclocking tests show that this slight boost in clock speed really does little to help ATI’s overall Crossfire performance levels, so it appears ATI made the right call on this one, as Crossfire XTX would have increased prices without helping performance much.
 

RichPLS

Champion
As for ease of use and flexibility, nVidia has ATI beaten. nVidia’s SLI systems are much easier to set up, from both a hardware and software perspective, and there are far more choices in terms of SLI motherboards in comparison to Crossfire motherboards. However, ATI is making great progress here, as all of Intel’s new 975X Pentium-D motherboards we’ve seen hitting the market are Crossfire ready. We applaud ATI’s movement towards “opening” their multi-GPU technology to other chipset manufacturers, whereas nVidia still remains set on their isolationist approach (which has actually worked out quite well for them thus far).