Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 SLI vs. ATI Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire

RavenXXX2 · 24 Jun 2010 at 09:38

http://www.techspot.com/review/289-geforce-gtx-480-sli-versus-radeon-5870-crossfire/

Rez to much for the 1GB 5870's?

Random-Rabbit · 24 Jun 2010 at 10:07

wow ... +1 for 480 SLI, so what happened to the warhead 5870 benchmarks!

0-2 FPS in crossfire ... I'm assuming driver issues ?

straxusii · 24 Jun 2010 at 10:14

It's a vram limit which is what you would expect with a 1GB card at 25x16 8xAA in some games

EvilOne · 24 Jun 2010 at 10:28

Seems like nvida aproved benchmarks lol. Guess techspot dont want black listing.

wolvers · 24 Jun 2010 at 10:32

Looks like ATI could do with improving crossfire scaling a bit. I'm surprised at how well a single 5870 stacks up against a 480, especially with min fps.

Freddie1980 · 24 Jun 2010 at 10:40

It would appear the extra vram gives the Nvidia cards the edge when it comes to running systems with multiple video card setups. It would be interesting to see if this truly is a vram issue or a driver issue, if the reviews scaled down the resolution to say 1920x1080/1200 with toned down the AA that should eliminate any vram bottleneck. Alternatively just run the same benchmarks with HD5870’s that have 2Gb’s of vram.

RavenXXX2 · 24 Jun 2010 at 10:40

EvilOne said:
Seems like nvida aproved benchmarks lol. Guess techspot dont want black listing.

Nah techspot are spot-on, not in the least biased to any one company.

straxusii · 24 Jun 2010 at 10:41

Because the above benchmarks are at or near the vram limits of the 5870 you can't judge overall multi GPU scaling on them, only scaling at the above settings.

Having said that my gut feeling is that SLI scales better than crossfire

RavenXXX2 · 24 Jun 2010 at 10:44

I think it's more a case of the the 480's being slightly faster than a 5870 and some of these games are TWIMTBP titles so I would expect them to scale better on Nvidia hardware.

wolvers · 24 Jun 2010 at 13:22

BC2 runs much better on ATI hardware but SLI is scaling better there.

JeffyB · 24 Jun 2010 at 13:32

Review is limited as it only shows results at a single resolution that highlight the 1gb frame buffer of the 5870. Would be interested to see the results for the 2gb 5870 to see if the extra vram made a difference, presuming the frame buffer maximum had been reached on the 1gb cards.

nalla · 24 Jun 2010 at 13:58

is there a benchmark option or something on the aliens vs predator as the benchmark above theat seems low if its just general playing, cos i just ran this on my machine with just one 480 and never went below 33 fps with just one card and up to 37 at stages, oh never cecked did they have tesselation on as mines off. but other settings all the same.

MonkeykingZX · 24 Jun 2010 at 14:01

wouldn't it have made more sense to test the 2gb 5870's against the 480's considering they're basicaly identical in price

liquidex · 24 Jun 2010 at 17:48

Again echoing everyone else, wondering how the 2gb 5870s would get on as it looks like they are vram limited and they cost roughly the same.

Boozebeard · 24 Jun 2010 at 18:04

I thought it well established that sli is slightly more effiecient than crossfire. Last figures I saw was an average of 1.7xfps for crossfire but much closer to 2xfps for sli.

NathWraith · 24 Jun 2010 at 20:48

In most benchmarks I'v found the 2GB 5870s only to be 3-4fps faster than the 1GB editions.

JeffyB · 24 Jun 2010 at 20:52

NathWraith said:
In most benchmarks I'v found the 2GB 5870s only to be 3-4fps faster than the 1GB editions.

Is that at a resolution where the 1gb card will be using its vram?

RavenXXX2 · 24 Jun 2010 at 20:55

May not use all its Vram at max rez, just certain areas in games push it over, that's why you may see some results with crysis and 5870's scaling well and others where they fail because they have ran out of memory, they are running different benchmarks.

NathWraith · 24 Jun 2010 at 20:55

JeffyB said:
Is that at a resolution where the 1gb card will be using its vram?

At 2560x1600 I think so. I think Crossfire has the hardware potential it just needs the drivers to optimise it efficiently enough.

layte · 24 Jun 2010 at 21:47

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce-gtx480-sli.html

The resolution of 1920x1080 is popular today because the Full HD format has become widespread. The GeForce GTX 480 SLI can shows its strength here, beating the Radeon HD 5870 CrossFire by an average 20%, which equals the difference in price between the two solutions. Nvidia’s tandem also shows varying scalability, from 15% to near 100% over the performance of the single card.