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

F1 2010

F1 2010 is a racing game based on the 2010 season of the Formula One world championship. It was released in September 2010 by Codemasters. The EGO 1.5 engine powers it. The weather system requires the player to adjust to changing track conditions.   F1 2011 has just been released and it is even less demanding than DiRT 3 which shares the same EGO 3.0 engine so we will continue to bench with this game.

Watch out for bad AI drivers!

First we test at 1920×1200 using ultra settings with the built-in benchmark and 8xAA.
AMD has mostly fixed their “negative scaling” which plagued this game for months – where CrossFired cards are actually slower in the minimums than their single card counterparts – but still we see no scaling beyond HD 6990.   In contrast, the GTXes scale better allowing GTX 580 SLI to beat HD 69×0-X3 although the Radeons are otherwise faster.  Let’s look at 2560×1600:

Now we see negative scaling with TriFire-X3 but not to make any noticeable performance difference.   This time the Radeons pass all of the comparable GeForce cards and combinations.  And now we test at 5760×1080.

Here the Radeons have the advantage.  Even with negative scaling of Tri-Fire, the Radeons take the checkered flag.