SLI vs. CrossFire, Part 2 – High-end multi-GPU scaling
BattleForge
BattleForge is an online PC game developed by EA Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts. The full game was released in March 2009. BattleForge is a card-based RTS that revolves around acquiring and winning by means of micro-transactions for buying new cards. By May, 2009, BattleForge became a Play 4 Free game with fewer cards than the retail version.
BattleForge supports Directx 11 with full support for hardware tesselation. It is very impressive visually and quite demanding on any system. First we test with our cards at 1920×1200 and 2560×1600 using the BattleForge built-in benchmark with all of its settings completely maxed out and with 8xAA:
We see excellent GPU scaling with both CrossFire and SLI with the Nvidia cards being faster than their AMD counterparts. Now we test at 5760×1080 and also with 8xAA.
The GTX 590 is the faster video card compared to the HD 6990 in BattleForge and the GTX 580 is considerably faster than HD 6970 Crossfire. Even though AMD cards scale very well, HD 69×0 TriFire-X3 cannot catch the pair of GTX 580s in SLI.
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!