2 5970s, is it dual Crossfire or quad Crossfire

It is called Quad Crossfire since four GPUs are involved.CrossFiring HD 5970s is a bad idea as they scale horribly in Crossfire.

so you would consider 1 5970 as working in Crossfire?!?

No, that's a single card.Its really a matter of what terminology you prefer.

thats what I am getting at, if 1 5970 isn't running in Crossfire, then 2 can't be running in quad, it would be dual. not trying to be argumentative, I'd just like to know if what I am saying makes sense or if I am out to lunch? correct me if I am wrong, but didn't Crossfire come out before dual GPU cards, if so the terminology is based on single GPU cards and therefore we can't use the same assumptions. if, one day in the future, we have a quad GPU card, you wouldn't call it quad Crossfire, would you? just like we don't say the 5970 by itself is crossfire, you need to add another card to make it crossfire, so then why does it jump to quad?

You can say whichever you want. You are technically using 4 gpu's though.

However, if I was using two 5970's, and I wanted to let someone know about it, it would be misleading to say I'm using quad crossfired 5970's. That terminology would probably lead someone to believe that you are occupying 4 PCI slots with your video card setup.

I get that, and I think it needs its own terminology. but its 2 cards working in crossfire, they just happen to both have 2 GPUs, i don't know, maybe quad crossfire is more accurate. I remember seeing a couple of months ago in the 5970 specs page, on the Amd website, in the fine print it said only supports dual crossfire, but it doesn't say that anymore.

A 5970 is in crossfire. It does experience all the draw backs of crossfire, other than only needing 1 PCIe slot.

If a game doesn't support crossfire, you only end up using 1 of the GPU's on the card.

Though you normally would refer to it as a single 5970, and crossfire is implied.

A single 5970 is already in CF. Two would be a quad setup. I wouldn't worry about saying quad CF setup and people thinking you are using four 5970 cards, thats their problem.

Its two cards but on a technical and performance level it is identical to a quadfire setup with all of its disadvantages. Personally running anything more than 2GPUs be it SLI or Crossfire is pretty bad since dimishing returns kicks in real hard. 3GPUs might have some merits but 4GPUs starts adding more overhead than actual performance.

Has anyone seen any 3 or 4way CF/SLI results with an Eyefinity type setup? I'm just wondering if we aren't stressing the CF/SLI setup enough with "just" 2560x1600 pixels.

ok, I guess we are going with quad. I am not sure about the not supporting crossfire means only using one of the GPUs, but if that is correct I guess it makes sense. I just wish AMD didn't change the website, ny whole side of it stems from it originally saying it only supports dual crossfire because of the 2 GPUs/board.

the reason it doesn't say that anymore is because it can be used in 3 card setups i.e. 1x 5970 and 2x 5870 for a total of 4 gpu's. Remember that ATI cards do not have to be identical to run crossfire.

correct, but when the card first came out, it did say in the fine print, dual crossfire only. old thread to be posting in though.

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey