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

Crysis

Next we move on to Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek. It remains one of the most demanding games for any PC and it is also still one of the most beautiful games released to date. Crysis is based in a fictional near-future where an alien spacecraft is discovered buried on an island near the coast of Korea. The single-player campaign has you assume the role of USA Delta Force, ‘Nomad’ who is armed with futuristic weapons and equipment.

Crysis uses DirectX10 for graphics rendering. As well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0, and DirectX10’s 4.0, CryEngine2 is also multi-threaded to take advantage of dual core SMP-aware systems and Crytek has developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics. However, it is noted that actually playing this game is a bit slower than the demo implies. All of our settings are set to the in-game maximum’s “very high” including 2xAA for all tested resolutions and we force 16xAF in the control panels.

Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark, first at 1920×1200 resolution:

Interesting.  All of our cards can play Crysis at 1920×1200 with maxed out details and 2xAA/16AF.  Unfortunately, CrossFire does not scale as well as with previous drivers and HD 6990, HD 6970 CrossFire and TriFire-X2 all suffer the same minimums and averages.  It is not the CPU being too slow as we see decent scaling with the GTX 580, GTX 590 and GTX 580 SLI

Next we test at 2560×1600.

With a higher resolution, we again see CrossFire differentiate itself from the single GPU and its scaling improve.  To play Crysis at 2560×1600, you definitely need a multi-GPU solution.

Our single HD 6970 simply cannot manage Crysis at these settings and adding a second one or third one is still not sufficient for smooth game play. On the other hand, GTX 590 is still too weak to play Crysis, but GTX 580 SLI may be close if we compromise a bit with settings.