SLI vs. CrossFire, Part 1 – mid-range multi-GPU scaling & value
BattleForge
BattleForge is an online PC game developed by EA Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts. The full game was released in March 2009. BattleForge is a card-based RTS that revolves around acquiring and winning by means of micro-transactions for buying new cards. By May, 2009, BattleForge became a Play 4 Free game with fewer cards than the retail version.
BattleForge supports Directx 11 with full support for hardware tesselation. It is very impressive visually and quite demanding on any system. First we test with our cards at 1920×1200 using the BattleForge built-in benchmark with all of its settings completely maxed out and with 4xAA:
Now we test at 1680×1050 and with 4xAA.
The GTX 580 is again the fastest video card in BattleForge followed by the GTX 570 and then by the GTX 480; and then more distantly by the HD 5870. The GTX 560 Ti is faster than AMD’s HD 6970 in this benchmark at our tested resolutions. The Radeons both crashed in CrossFire attempting to play this game although it is a better situation than with the previous 10.12 Catalyst drivers when even our HD 5870 refused to start this game. Again we see the GTS 450, unplayable as a single video card, take on this game in SLI. Our GTX 460 SLI sits just below a single GTX 580 in performance while GTX 560 Ti SLI is the fastest configuration that we tested here.
I’m not 100% certain, but to analyze microstuttering, place a check in the box next to “Frametimes” in Fraps. Then when you press the hotkey, it will create a log file with a timestamp when each single frame was outputted. Only a few seconds is enough to make the log file really, really long. Then take a portion out of the log file and make a chart out of it, that measures the time between each timestamp, to see if the frames are consistent with each other in similar intervals, or if every other frame is too close to the other one.
If a game runs at say, 45fps with your SLI or CF setup, but feels more like 23-30fps, then definitely analyze this with FRAPS.
Great review so far.
How do the numbers change, if at all, if Split Frame Rendering is used instead of Alternate Frame Rendering?
The last time I used SLI was with my Voodoo2 3000s. It was a gigantic waste of $200, in 1996 dollars.
If SFR eliminates micro-stutter without too much of a performance penalty I might have to try SLI again.
why don’t they add BF:BC2?
and also 6950 n 6970 crossfire?
Concerning the microstutter, frames time (using that fraps option) is supposed to fluctuate more erratically on crossfire/sli than what it would be on a single card. I think instead of testing a moving scene, it would make more sense to test it on a completely still scene for a few seconds and see how they compare in the excel output file. You don’t want a moving scene because then you won’t be able to differentiate between the erracticness you would get from a moving scene and the erraticness you would get from microstutter.
Another interest option would be to downclock a sli/crossfire setup to a point where it matches the average framerate of the single card. This way you could could see if the multi-gpu setup looks choppier than a single card despite having the same average frame rate.
Excellent work! At the end, simple recommendations would have been nice. =)
Please include Civilization 5 if possible the next time you benchmark.
It is an important game which will test the tesselation feature and its scaling ability in multi-gpu configurations.
Civilization 5 has been added to my benching suite along with DiRT 3 and Total War, Shogun 2.
You’ve done a great job of benchmarking gaming performance, but including charts with FPS vs $$, and $$ vs wattage would be much more useful.
The wattage (both idle and load) figures can be especially important, as some of these cards can easily draw more juice than all but the most powerful (and expensive) power supplies can provide — and that definitely factors into the cost analysis.