SLI vs. CrossFire, Part 2 – High-end multi-GPU scaling
Heaven 2.0 Unigine
Finally we come to our last benchmark, Heaven 2.1, on the Unigine engine. It uses DX11 and heavy tessellation which will strain any graphics card. At least two DX11 games based on Unigine are expected to be released next year. We use the setting for “extreme tessellation” and high shaders and we also set AA to 4x and AF to 16x.
We see decent scaling overall but the GeForce video cards have the advantage although TriFire is fastest. In this case, we see that the Cypress architecture is bottlenecked by its tessellator, however, this is a synthetic benchmark and we will withhold judgment until we play PC games using the Unigine engine.
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!