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

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is a 2010 sandbox-style action video game by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive and is the sequel to the 2006 video game, Just Cause. Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0 which an updated version of the engine used in the original and there are impressive visuals as it is made just for DX10. It is set on the fictional tropical island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist who aims to overthrow the evil dictator “Baby” Panay and also to confront his former boss, rogue agent Tom Sheldon.

The game play is similar to that of its predecessor in that the player is free to roam the huge open world without a need to focus on the storyline.   Just Cause 2 even includes dual-grappling hooks which give players the ability to tether unlimited objects to each other including the tethering of enemies to vehicles and to each other which works very well as one of your goals is to cause maximum chaos. It is a lot of fun!  And it is spectacular looking in Surround or Eyefinity, not to mention it is exceptional with 3D Vision and 3D Vision Surround.

Here are the maximum settings available to a GeForce card; the bottom two, the Bokeh Filter and GPU water simulation, are unavailable to Radeons and they are left off on all runs to give solid apples-to-apples comparisons for all of our tested video cards and we used the Dark Tower benchmark built into the retail game. First the benches at 1920×1200 and 2560×1600 with 8xAA and maxed out settings:

We see almost perfect scaling from HD 6970 to HD 6970 CrossFire and Tri-Fire-X3 also gets a solid performance boost.  The same can be said for the GTX 580 and SLI although the HD 6990 and the GTX 590 trade blows depending on the resolution.

Now let’s look at the performance at 5760×1080:

This time the HD 6990 is stronger than the GTX 590 at the highest Super-Widescreen resolution although the GTX 580 SLI edges out the  HD 6970-X2 CrossFire and nearly catches TriFire-X3.