SLI vs. CrossFire, Part 2 – High-end multi-GPU scaling

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 is a survival horror third-person shooter developed and published by Capcom that has become the best selling single title in the series. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil series and it was released for Windows in September 2009. Resident Evil 5 revolves around two investigators pulled into a bio-terrorist threat in a fictional town in Africa. Resident Evil 5 features online co-op play over the internet.

The developer’s emphasis is in optimizing high frame rates but they have implemented HDR, tone mapping, depth of field and motion blur into the game. Re5’s custom game engine, ‘MT Framework’, already supports DX10 to benefit from less memory usage and faster loading. Resident Evil 5 gives you choice as to DX10 or Dx 9 and we naturally ran the DX10 pathway.

There are two benchmarks built-into Resident Evil 5. We chose the variable benchmark as it is best suited for testing video cards. Here it is at 1920×1200 and 2560×1600 resolution with maxed out in-game setting plus 8xAA; 5760×1080 gives a strange in-game menu that is hard to set so we skipped it:

This game is played easily at 2560×1600 with either a top single-GPU Radeon or GeForce with the GTX 580 winning out.  However, CrossFire scaling is better than SLI scaling and attempts to close the distance.  TriFire-X3 gives a small performance boost at 2560×1600 but gives negative scaling at 1920×1200; probably a driver issue.