Should I upgrade or Crossfire?

[sanders2]

Right now I've got a AMD 6770 and I was planning on picking up another one to run crossfire; however, I've been examining a lot of literature on crossfire performance and it seems very variable. There's also seems to be the persistent issue of micro-stuttering when running crossfire, which cripples fps. Should I just buy a better graphics card (wouldn't like to spend more than $200) or give crossfire a shot?

 

[cmi86]

Id just buy another 6770, Micro stuttering only happens when the cards are not properly configured. 6770's scale quite well. Even if you spend the whole $200 on a different card I highly doubt you will find anything in that price range that will out run 2 6770's in CFX.

 

[jdwii]

Right now I've got a AMD 6770 and I was planning on picking up another one to run crossfire; however, I've been examining a lot of literature on crossfire performance and it seems very variable. There's also seems to be the persistent issue of micro-stuttering when running crossfire, which cripples fps. Should I just buy a better graphics card (wouldn't like to spend more than $200) or give crossfire a shot?

I was going to say get a 6870 until i read this. Please note its a 6770 in CF

http://www.guru3d.com/article/his-radeon-6770-iceqx-turbo-crossfire-review/1

Nice it should perform around a 6950-6970 on CF. But It's been reported the SLI and CF micro shutters But some people don't notice it. If it was me i would get a 6870 or 560 and sell the 6770 on amazon or sell it to a friend.

 

[sanders2]

Thank you both for the replies. According to the guru3d article it seems to scale extremely well in all DX 11 games. For now I think I'll save the money and run crossfire. I'll upgrade to a new gpu in a couple years when I build a new pc.

 

[gnomio]

Remember to get that 60 to 70 percent performance gain you need to stay on the same resolution. The mistake people make is thinking that sli/crossfire is one big rendering engine then they go up their resolution as well.
What happens then is that the cards struggle to render the single frames quickly enough because they don't have the horse power to do it.
Crossfire or sli is still being seen as 2 separate cards by your system. So one will render the odd and the other the even frames. If your upgrading your resolution always buy the monitor first then see what performance your card gets at that resolution before buying another card. Then just add 60 to 70 percent performance margin onto that and you'll roughly know what performance you'll get out of them.
Its very important to see what time it takes for 1 card to render a frame on a certain resolution. Something we don't see unfortunately in the benchmarks.

The 6870s people made the mistake by thinking it can perform better than the 580. So what they do is get another card and run it at 1080p everything maxed out because the 580 can do it. But the 580 got the horsepower to do the rendering quick enough. The 6870 will then hit a frame that's a bit heavier than what the other card needed to do and due to having less horsepower will take longer where the time to render the frame will go through the roof. That's when the micro stuttering starts