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

FarCry 2

Far Cry 2 uses the name of the original Far Cry but it is not connected to the first game as it brings you a new setting and a new story. Ubisoft created it based on their Dunia Engine. The game setting takes place in an unnamed African country, during an uprising between two rival warring factions. Your mission is to kill “The Jackal”; the Nietzsche-quoting mercenary that arms both sides of the conflict that you are dropped into.

The Far Cry 2 game world is loaded in the background and on the fly to create a completely seamless open world. The Dunia game engine provides good visuals that scale well. The Far Cry 2 design team actually went to Africa to give added realism to this game. One thing to especially note is Far Cry 2’s very realistic fire propagation by their engine that is a far cry from the scripted fire and explosions that we are used to seeing.

First we test Far Cry 2 benchmark at 1920×1200 with AI enabled and we use the Ranch Long benchmark with ultra settings plus 4xAA.

The GTX 580 is solidly faster than the HD 6970 but good CrossFire scaling lets the Radeon almost catch the GTX 580 SLI.  Let’s move on up to 2560×1600 resolution.

At the higher resolution, the GeForce solutions pull further away from their Radeon counterparts.  Let’s up the resolution to 5760×1080.

Here we see a clean sweep by the GTXes in Far Cry 2 although the Radeons get close at 1920×1200 and CrossFire-X3 definitely leads over the GTX 580 SLI configuration.