SLI vs. CrossFire, Part 2 – High-end multi-GPU scaling
Wolfenstein
Wolfenstein is a science fiction first-person shooter video game mostly co-developed by Raven and id Software and published by Activision. It is the sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and uses the id Tech 4 engine. The game was released in 2009.
Our timedemo benchmark was created by BFG10K. It is very accurate and totally repeatable. First we test at 1920×1200 and then at 2560×1600 (on the same chart) with completely maxed out in-game settings.
It looks like driver issues are to blame for Nvidia’s poor relative performance in this OpenGL game compared to the competing Radeons. It needs to be optimized to run well on GeForce hardware although it surprisingly does scale with SLI. Our GTS 580 can barely manage this game at 2560×1600 although scaling is nearly perfect with clockspeeds for the GTX 590 and GTX 580 SLI.
The HD 6970 scaling is very good and the HD 6990 sits a bit lower than HD 6970 CrossFire due to its lower clocks. Adding a third HD 6990 to HD 6990 for CrossFire-X3 gives a nice – if meaningless – boost to the already high framerates.
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!