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

Batman: Arkham Asylum (Game of the Year Edition) Batman: Arkham Asylum is an action-adventure/stealth video game based on DC Comics’ Batman. Arkham Asylum is based directly on the long-running comic book’s Dark Knight character. The Joker devised an elaborate plot from inside Arkham Asylum that Batman is personally forced to end. The game’s primary characters are superbly voiced.

Batman: Arkham Asylum uses a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3. It does not support AA natively but must be added in and supported by the game’s developer. Unfortunately we cannot compare Batman: Arkham Asylum using our GeForce exactly against the Radeon with PhysX on; so all of our testing is with it off. We are using the Game of the Year Edition of Batman: Arkham Asylum which supports in-game AA settings for both Radeon and GeForce cards.

First we test at 1920×1200 and we see that there are definite issues with CrossFire-X3 scaling.  Of course, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to actually playing the game.

Next we test at 2560×1600 with the same details maxed and with the same AA applied noticing that CrossFire-X3 scales a bit over HD 6970 CrossFire-X2.  Perhaps our CPU is holding us back a little bit, although we will see no practical difference with higher framerates.

No card is challenged by the Unreal 3 engine at 2560×1600 and the minimums suggest you can play with vsync on.  However, the framerates are not heavily impacted by going from 1920×1200 to 2560×1600 with our fastest graphics configurations which suggests they may be waiting on the CPU.  Let’s see if 5960×1080 can slow our cards down.

Now we see very strange driver results which suggests this game is not optimized well for multi-GPU – nor does it need to be as the minimums are already very high. However, we no longer see our CPU waiting for our Graphics as we have managed to balance it at this high resolution.  The Radeons are all grouped together while the GTX 580 SLI manages a reasonable performance boost over the two lower-clocked GTX 580 GPUs in the GTX 590.