Crossfire meets PCI Express 2.0 - More Lanes, More Frames?

Nice project, thanks for doing that research. Also, nice work with discussing the error. It is a relevant variation in data that people overlook when making conclusions.

Would have been nice if they didn't limit the testing to INTEL only boards. I'm interested in seeing how much of a performance increase if any I got going to my GA-MA790FX-DQ6 which also sports PCI Express 2.0 and dual x16 slots for Video cards which house my pair of 3870s.

Good conclusion for the interface vs. "real world" results... however I have issue with this paragraph on the last page:


b/c you are talking in percentages there, you cannot expect a "doubling" of percentage with two cards. If a single card gets "between 7 and 8 percent" and the dual cards show a 7.7 percent increase (also between 7 and 8) then you have a linear scale between the single and dual card config. This means that the x16 interface IS as effective for both single and dual cards.

You got a doubling of the increase in frames, but NOT the percentage. "Doubling" in this case means the percentage stays the same from single to dual cards but the raw increase is doubled. This is a 100% increase on raw numbers (doubled), but the increase on the difference percentage from one interface to the other should stay exactly the same.

Example: if 100 cows produce 50 pounds of crap eating grain, and 75 pounds eating grass (a 50% increase from 50 to 75) and 200 cows produce 100 and 150 pounds respectively (also a 50% increase) you can see that the increase from grain to grass is doubled when the cow numbers are doubled, but the percentage of that increase stays the same. This means that when the cows are doubled, they produces twice the amount of crap... but the increase of that crap from grain to grass is exactly the same. (best analogy I could come up w/ on short notice   )

The conclusion that the x16 interface is not as effective for CF is false. It is a near perfect linear scale, which means it is as effective.

Now, in real world gameplay does it really matter? no, the raw numbers are not that high... so your final conclusion about not being a worthwhile upgrade is correct. So is the conclusion that the increase could be anything outside of the interface...

wow, well spotted!

One thing to keep in mind... when discussing PCIe 2.0 remember that the 5GT/s lane speed is optional. Vendors can label a board or system as V2.0 compliant and NOT design in the higher speed I/O.

Look closely at the specs for both the system and your add-in card.

The CEOs of AMD and nVidia would like to thank you for that wonderful analogy. I'm sure by now they have already mailed you some nice video cards as a reward. You don't mind if they use it in their presentations, do you?    

rofl, nope... not at all. Whatever I can do to help and contribute to the betterment of society.  

One thing i would like to point out that didn't seem to get mentioned is that we don't need to wait for GeForce 9xxx or ATi 4xxx. They ahve it with the new X2 cards that are coming out. 2 GPUs on the same board will use double the bandwidth. Hence they need the 2.0 interface. This testing would be well to do again with the dual GPU cards once they hit the street. I bet in PCIe 1.0a the cards will loose a significant amount of performance over 2.0.

Agreed, I want to see the HD 3870 X2 card tested on P35 and X38 ASAP.

Just guessing:
- the HD 3870 works at 92% of its normal speed if you put it in an x8 PCI-E 1.0a slot. This means it needs 50%*(100/92) of the bandwidth of a x16 PCI-E 1.0a. If the X2 needs twice the bandwidth of the HD 3870,
then it will need 100/92 of what the PCI-E 1.0a x16 slot offers, so it will also lose 8% compared to its best, i.e. compared to what it can do in a PCI-E 2.0 slot. But maybe the X2 doesn't need twice as much bandwidth as the HD 3870, and there won't be any penalty at all if you run it in a PCI-E 1.0a slot. I can hardly wait to see this actually measured...

Edit: or maybe the X2 needs three times the bandwidth of the HD 3870 because of some overhead, and it will stink big time in P35 motherboards.  

Pffft, sure, if you use math, logic and reason !!  

Math is so 2007, don't you know it's all about the size of numbers this year, not what they mean !?!

BTW, nice find, haven't had time to read the article yet, but now at least I can read it with the correct 'edit' already in my head.

Way to read the review(s) instead of just looking at the graphics/pictures.

thanks grape... I could not resist that one when I read it. Blatant lack of logic when making a "logical" conclusion just bugs me.  

seems like today there is less and less true logic in the "news"... stats and reports showing "conclusively" that the environment is dead, westerners are evil violent turds and iranian fundamentalists are benign angels... I just can't tolerate it on a tech site where it is (or should be) run by effective geeks/nerds that should have math, logic and reason as their base foundation of knowledge.

...of course, maybe that's just me.  

My head hurts after reading that post but very good information.

VERY Good article and should solve a lot of forum debates. Thanks!

According to this AMD presentation:
http://download.amd.com/Corporate/SpiderPlatformPresent...
(Slide 20)

Going from PCIe1.1 to PCIe2.0 yields the following performance improvement:

Company of Heroes: 6% to 13%
Call of Juarez: 11% to 22%.
Lost Planet: 12%
World in Conflict: 6%

Maybe rechecking with Call of Juarez (apparently the best case scenario) would be nice.

This article has been up for ages on the UK site. Its not like they had to translate it. Don't know it took so long to get it on the US site.

Ok... so is anyone else rather irritated that they ONLY tested Intel boards rather than testing CF on the new AM2+ 790FX Chipset??? http://img.tomshardware.com/forum/uk/icones/message/ico...

That bothers me mainly for the reason that the 790GX chipset is custom-tailored for crossfire, while the x38 isn't.
Perhaps they should've done a comparison of % gains with similarly-clocked Phenoms and C2E's with CF and Tri-Sli respectively. That way they could get a full-compatibility comparison. Just a thought.

I thought x38 was custom-tailored for Crossfire. It does offer dual x16 slots for it, better than P35. No clue what you mean by that. Is there anything that X38 doesn't have and it would make Crossfire better?

I totally agree that coverage of AMD could and should be better. It's always nice to have full info about both sides before you buy.

Perhaps you're correct, I haven't fully reasearched the x38 chipset, I just know that 790fx is amd/ati so in my mind it's more appropriately suited for CF.

However, I'm rather astonished that in about half the benchmarks they didn't test CF of any sort... thanks for the useful info and comparison to SLI.

Well, I've seen a 790fx mobo that allows 4 (FOUR) cards in Crossfire. Now that is serious stuff indeed  

Those results depress me... and my pitiful CF system. 9 fps against 28 fps on WIC on 1920 with AA on... WTF.... this tells me that ATI has to make a driver for every game which is rediculous. the SLI systems get beat on 1 or 2 games, but scales to different games alot better.

I HAVE a 790FX mobo that allows 4 cards in CF, here's how it works:

It has PCIe 2.0 which supports two full lanes at 16x each and divides them by two to get 4 8x lanes.
Basically dual original CF on one mobo. Still pretty impressive, albeit slightly impractical.

And don't be too depressed about the results, in case you didn't look too closely at the results, they did NOT test PCIe 2.0 CF on about HALF of the games.

I do not see how this article answers the question of P35 Crossfire performance.
Sure, there is a test of x4 performance with a SINGLE card, but assuming that is indicative of how Crossfire would perform in a 16x/4x configuration seems incorrect due to one big fact: The Crossfire Bridge provides loads of bandwidth for communication between the two cards, so it's very possible the reduced bandwidth of the x4 slot wouldn't impact performance nearly as much when the bridge is in use as the x4 limitation does in a single card setup.