AMD CrossFire Vs. Nvidia SLI Scaling Analysis

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

We’ve seen impressive performance from Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460 when it's matched up with a second card in SLI mode. But how does the entire high-end GeForce GTX 400 line compare to Radeon HD 5000-series cards? We test them all in several popular games.

Benchmark Results: Far Cry 2

We can see that the GeForce GTX 480 and faster configurations are bumping into a CPU bottleneck in Far Cry 2. Aside from that, this game engine seems to favor GeForce solutions when 8x anti-aliasing (AA) is enabled.

At the high 2560x1600 resolution, the Radeon cards in CrossFire suffer a substantial performance hit, and the GeForce GTX 460 in SLI provides a lower minimum frame rate than expected. It’s probable that some of the blame can be placed on the cards’ 1 GB frame buffer compared to the 1280 MB on the GeForce GTX 470 and the 1536 MB on the GeForce GTX 480. In support of the RAM theory, we saw the 4 GB Asus Ares—essentially two 2 GB Radeon HD 5870s in CrossFire on a card--perform slightly better than the GeForce GTX 480 in this benchmark at this resolution with 8x AA applied.

Don Woligroski
106 Comments Comment from the forums
  • reprotected
    So... Nvidia won?
    Reply
  • joytech22
    Now i can safely say that i think i made the right choice :)
    (GTX470 SLI)
    Reply
  • jrharbort
    Nvidia wins this war thanks to the larger standard framebuffer. ATI needs to pick up in this area a bit, as 1GB framebuffers have been around for a while now. Looking foward to another article based on the next gen cards a few months from now. Should be interesting. =)

    Good job to both ATI and Nvidia on this generation.
    Reply
  • gordo_46
    BUT.. i would have preferred 2-3 way SLI with GTX460's.

    gtx 460 can only do 2 way sli
    Reply
  • gkay09
    The SLI scaling is one place where Nvidia wins almost all the time, but ATI has improved a lot though, it still need to work harder if they want to have a complete win over Nvidia...
    Reply
  • joytech22
    gordo_46gtx 460 can only do 2 way sli
    Aww damn that's right..
    Reply
  • gordo_46
    yeah it a shame that it can only do 2 way sli. We would get 3 way gtx 470 sli level performance at amd radeon power consumption
    Reply
  • Nice article. I've made some charts, based on the data in this article, that reflect SLI and CrossFireX scalings. Nvidia's victory is clear cut at 2560 x 1600.

    1920x1200
    http://www.imagebam.com/image/741eca102680169

    2560x1600
    http://www.imagebam.com/image/0295fe102680172

    Also, when it comes to GPU discussions, the comment sections of Tom's and Fudzilla are swarmed by fanboys of 1 certain team. (Can you tell which? It's already obvious here, but much more so at Fudzilla.) Competition is good. Don't downrank comments just because they favor the "other" team.
    Reply
  • Twoboxer
    12 million people with WoW subscriptions, new expansion due 12/7/10, lot's of vid cards being bought for that purpose . . . I know its not easy, the format may have to be different, but can you guys consider including WoW in the benching runs?
    Reply
  • Yet another reason AMD would be happy to never have board of theirs allow SLI
    Reply