AMD CrossFire Vs. Nvidia SLI Scaling Analysis
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Page 1:It’s That Time Again
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Page 2:Test System And Benchmarks
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Page 3:Benchmark Results: Crysis
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Page 4:Benchmark Results: Just Cause 2
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Page 5:Benchmark Results: Far Cry 2
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Page 6:Benchmark Results: Aliens Vs Predator
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Page 7:Benchmark Results: DiRT 2
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Page 8:Benchmark Results: StarCraft II
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Page 9:Power-Usage Benchmarks
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Page 10:Conclusion
Benchmark Results: StarCraft II
StarCraft 2 is clearly bottlenecked by our host platform. But CrossFire is performing very poorly here in comparison to the competition, with the single-card performance faring better than two cards in CrossFire mode. Hopefully, AMD will address this problem with a Catalyst Control Center profile update in the near future.
Summary
gtx 460 can only do 2 way sli
first, i'd like to thank angel1980^^ for doing what tom's should have done... seeing as how scaling itself was implied to be the thing tested from the article title.
Annoyance aside, I also crunched the numbers, but was left a dilemma as to whom to declare the winner of the multi-gpu scaling. In the end, I wanted similar performance because higher performance = more bandwidth that must be managed and I wanted the same amount of vram. This conveniently leaves the gtx 460 and two amd cards on either side. (But makes my whole analysis somewhat pointless since there's so little data)
Pushing on, using my awesome-o math skills, I derived the following results:
Using the 1080p res, the GTX 460 1GB had scaling values of 1.590 and 1.473, avg, min, respectively. The 5830 and 5850 averaged had values of 1.572 and 1.488.
Using the big 2560x1600 resolution, the GTX 460 1GB had values of 1.768 (!!) and 1.414. The lower 58 had 1.454 and 1.216.
My conclusions? (Completely biased)
At what I think most gamers play at and are comfortable and familiar with, 1080p, AMD's greatest and Nvidia's greatest (the GTX 460 did scale better than the 470 and 480 consistently) architectures scale equally well. However, looking at the 2560x1600 res, we see that Nvidia takes a huge lead... which I suspect indicates Nvidia's SLI tech is better at handling large amounts of data while AMD's is probably a little quicker. (Just a hunch really, you hopefully noticed that this is completely biased, I am an AMD fan) (But the scaling on the 460 was very impressive, hence !!)
I am not surprised at all, it was oft muttered that SLI was superior to AMD's CF. However, what I found surprising is how little that really mattered. The games that favored architectures still favored the representative scaling technology. Simply, look at piggy bank and adjust your reality accordingly. AND, I haven't seen any numbers, but I know AMD released a catalyst update to boost SC2 CF performance, so feel confident in pretending AMD's numbers are truly a smidgen higher.
My shameless endorsement of AMD's overall tech though is simple; in a multi-card situation, it uses a whole lot less power and won't inspire you to break out eggs and bacon. And I must confess I barely sleep thinking of what golden deity AMD will let me waste my money on in just a few days.....
TL;DR Scaling still sucks. At lower resolutions, it's pretty much the same unless you get cards with extra ram, then I don't know, but perf++ regardless. At high bandwidth things, like high res or high performance, sniff, Nvidia takes the cake.
Last bit to holto243:
Those numbers are relative to the performance of the pretty weak 5830. It simply means the GTX 480 is simply better (ignoring raw power) at handling min framerates in the games tested.
(GTX470 SLI)
Good job to both ATI and Nvidia on this generation.
gtx 460 can only do 2 way sli
Aww damn that's right..
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.
I'd like to hear some discussion on the best way to reliably test WoW, actually.
Divide by zero O.o
first, i'd like to thank angel1980^^ for doing what tom's should have done... seeing as how scaling itself was implied to be the thing tested from the article title.
Annoyance aside, I also crunched the numbers, but was left a dilemma as to whom to declare the winner of the multi-gpu scaling. In the end, I wanted similar performance because higher performance = more bandwidth that must be managed and I wanted the same amount of vram. This conveniently leaves the gtx 460 and two amd cards on either side. (But makes my whole analysis somewhat pointless since there's so little data)
Pushing on, using my awesome-o math skills, I derived the following results:
Using the 1080p res, the GTX 460 1GB had scaling values of 1.590 and 1.473, avg, min, respectively. The 5830 and 5850 averaged had values of 1.572 and 1.488.
Using the big 2560x1600 resolution, the GTX 460 1GB had values of 1.768 (!!) and 1.414. The lower 58 had 1.454 and 1.216.
My conclusions? (Completely biased)
At what I think most gamers play at and are comfortable and familiar with, 1080p, AMD's greatest and Nvidia's greatest (the GTX 460 did scale better than the 470 and 480 consistently) architectures scale equally well. However, looking at the 2560x1600 res, we see that Nvidia takes a huge lead... which I suspect indicates Nvidia's SLI tech is better at handling large amounts of data while AMD's is probably a little quicker. (Just a hunch really, you hopefully noticed that this is completely biased, I am an AMD fan) (But the scaling on the 460 was very impressive, hence !!)
I am not surprised at all, it was oft muttered that SLI was superior to AMD's CF. However, what I found surprising is how little that really mattered. The games that favored architectures still favored the representative scaling technology. Simply, look at piggy bank and adjust your reality accordingly. AND, I haven't seen any numbers, but I know AMD released a catalyst update to boost SC2 CF performance, so feel confident in pretending AMD's numbers are truly a smidgen higher.
My shameless endorsement of AMD's overall tech though is simple; in a multi-card situation, it uses a whole lot less power and won't inspire you to break out eggs and bacon. And I must confess I barely sleep thinking of what golden deity AMD will let me waste my money on in just a few days.....
TL;DR Scaling still sucks. At lower resolutions, it's pretty much the same unless you get cards with extra ram, then I don't know, but perf++ regardless. At high bandwidth things, like high res or high performance, sniff, Nvidia takes the cake.
Last bit to holto243:
Those numbers are relative to the performance of the pretty weak 5830. It simply means the GTX 480 is simply better (ignoring raw power) at handling min framerates in the games tested.