How dual GPU cards work in games with known xfire/SLI issues/bugs

[vmem]

Hey guys,

This is more a question for my own curiosity and stems from my recent experiments with heavy Skyrim modding to get more enjoyment out of the game. After applying tons of high-res textures, shading, and lighting effects, I have more or less hit a limit with my sapphire 7970 dual-x card. while it's certainly a nice card, I can only get about an hour or two of decent gaming in before the card more or less craps out and i'll need to give the computer a short break and reboot to keep going. I know this is related to GPU workload because if I just tone down the settings a bit, I can avoid these issues (which is what I do mostly anyway).

So just out of curiosity, how would my system work with something like say a gtx690, or one of the kinda awkward 7970x2 cards? the reason that I would look at a single card solution is because a lot of the mods I run have known crossfire/SLI issues, and I've tested and crashed the game multiple times myself running a pair of 7970s. Now I'm aware that dual card solutions essentially run a crossfire bridge within the same card, but would this in anyway alleviate known crossfire/SLI issues? I'm asking because this doesn't only apply to my skyrim mods, but many other games, especially console ports, are known to have weird issues/bugs when running on two or more cards simply because the games aren't ported/coded to be able to use that kind of system effectively

Thanks in advance!

 

[vmem]

well, I'm running it on 1440p as well and I think grass/tree shading with full shadow effects running that ENB mod combined with "thicker forests" and "thicker grass fields" and "dynamic snow" is what's slowing down my skyrim. of course, it's nothing that tuning down AA to 4x won't fix. FYI I can't seem to get my card past 1150MHz, but that's not really the card's fault I guess

and when I say the card "craps out", I meant that on two instances now, I would get a brief black screen, then my game graphics would come back in horrendously low settings (looks like 8-bit or something). in all honestly it could be more of a mod issue than the card, but I haven't been able to pin-point the issue so far. I must say that running all these mods allows me to take some amazing Cyrodiil nature screens.

Thanks for the quick reply/answer. I guess at the end of the day, these single card solutions are really only for people who doesn't have room to CF or SLI in their box...

 

[vmem]

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