SLI vs. CrossFire, Part 2 – High-end multi-GPU scaling
Lost Planet 2
Lost Planet 2 is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition and is also made by Capcom. The events take place ten years after the first game and on the same, now thawed, EDN III. The PC version was released on October 12, 2010 and it runs on the MT-Framework 2.0 engine; an updated version of the engine used in several Capcom games.
Campaign mode can have up to 4 players working together over the Internet. Lost Planet 2 allows players to create and customize their own characters which will allow them to unlock more things after leveling up and downloading content. We are using the retail game’s built-in benchmark in DX11 with maximum settings. As the game is quite demanding, we first test at 1920×1200 and 2560×1600 resolutions with 4xAA.
Just as in the original game, none of our single-GPU cards can play easily play Lost Planet 2 at 2560×1600 at the highest settings although the GTX 580 comes closest. However, we see the GeForce cards easily faster than the Radeons in this game and although CrossFire scaling is decent, they never come close.
In this more tessellation-heavy DX11 game, the GeForce cards have the advantage and GTX 580 SLI is quite playable at 5760×1080; TriFire-X3 and the GTX 590 a bit less so and we might cut the AA.
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!