SLI vs. CrossFire, Part 2 – High-end multi-GPU scaling
Civilization V
Sid Meier’s Civilization V is a beautiful game that takes advantage of DX11’s tessellation to produce some amazing character models. There are three benchmarks that can be run from a command line and we chose the “lateGameView” Benchmark as it looks to be a good test. You stare out over a vast area completely covered by your forces as they await your commands.
First we test at 1920×1200 and 2560×1600 with the highest details and 2xAA.
Surround didn’t work properly in Super Widescreen resolutions and this must be a driver issue. However, there really isn’t a lot of performance difference between the two resolutions once you get to multi-GPU. That indicates that this game might well benefit from a faster CPU. We will test this out in Part III. In the meantime, the Nvidia cards are solidly faster than their Radeon counterparts.
Thanks for this article. It was a very interesting read
I’m really looking forward to the next parts in the series. Overclocking and potential CPU-bottlenecking in Single-Card VS SLI is something I’ve been wondering about for a long while. And also microstuttering, I’ve never experienced it myself, but it scares me enough to make me cautions of buying another GTX 570 to SLI.
And oh, is it possible to get Battlefield 3 Beta added in your test-games?
Thanks for the feedback. I would not be afraid of getting a second GTX 570 for SLI. Nvidia (and AMD) work to minimize micro stuttering in the drivers and it is something that you can generally further alleviate by backing down on settings if you notice it.
I plan to add BF3 to my regular benching suite after it is released. The beta is only going to be valid for less than a month.
Thank you very much for this! It isn’t easy finding benchmark results with newer drivers. Not for a quad-SLI or quadfire setup that is. Cheers!
Err, strike the quad-SLI and quadfire part, but all the same – it is nice to find more up to date benchmarks!