SLI vs. CrossFire, Part 2 – High-end multi-GPU scaling
Crysis 2 DX11
Crysis 2 is a beautiful game and a worthy successor to Crysis – especially once the DX11 patch and high resolution textures were released. We are picking one of the most demanding parts of the game for our benchmark – so most of the game should be faster than our benchmark. First we start with 1920×1200.
We see a clean sweep by the Nvidia cards. Negative scaling for TriFire-X3 certainly doesn’t help the AMD cards. HD 6970 is just sufficient to play Crysis 2 at 1920×1200 while the GTX 580 stays well above 30 fps as a minimum for fluid play. Let’s up the resolution to 2560×1600:
Here it takes a GTX 590 or HD 6990 to run Crysis 2 at 2560×1600 and the GeForce cards have the advantage here. Let’s see if any combination can run it at 5760×1080.
Although the Nvidia cards are faster, no combination can play Crysis 2 at this resolution.
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!