SLI vs. CrossFire, Part 1 – mid-range multi-GPU scaling & value
Wolfenstein
Wolfenstein is a science fiction first-person shooter video game mostly co-developed by Raven and id Software and published by Activision. It is the sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and uses the id Tech 4 engine. The game was released in 2009.
Our timedemo benchmark was created by ABT’s own Senior Editor and lead reviewer, BFG10K. It is very accurate and totally repeatable. First we test at 2560×1600 with completely maxed out in-game settings.
Now we test at 1920×1200 with maxed out settings.
It looks like driver issues are to blame for Nvidia’s poor relative performance in this OpenGL game compared to the competing Radeons. It needs to be optimized to run well on GeForce hardware although it surprisingly does scale with SLI. Our GTS 450 cannot manage this game and although scaling is nearly perfect; SLI’d GTS 450 still falls short. We also see GTX 460 SLI surpass our GTX 580 performance in this game.
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.