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Is crossfire as bad as they say it is?

TheLegendOfMart

TheLegendOfMart

TheLegendOfMart

Associate
Joined
25 Sep 2009
Posts
2,386
Location
Darwen
Current Spec:

Core i5 2400
Gigabyte Z68 Board
20Gb DDR3 (2x 8 and 2x 2)
2Gb 7850
128Gb SSD

With Crysis 3 MP Beta demolishing my framerates I was looking at graphics cards.

I can pick up a second hand 7850 for 120 quid or so, I have the support for it with regards to mobo and psu. But I always get worried because people complain about crap drivers, microstutter and the like.

Is it more trouble than its worth, should I just slap another 7850 in there?
 
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It will always be better to have one very powerful card over two. The only time you should run CFX or SLI is when one card is enough and the other is there to prop up your system when it starts to show age.

One 7850 is not enough to run every game out there maxed out (Metro and Sleeping Dogs are two examples) and it never will be. This means that should your Crossfire act up at any given moment you are going to witness visible issues.

I haven't used CFX since the 5770 but it put me off for life. It goes back to what I've said above. One card was not man enough so when it was lacking support or the profiles did not work I was left with a slow jerky game (in this instance NFS : Shift).

SLI on the other hand? the only time it has annoyed me was when I ran quad SLI. And that ended up being easily fixed by selecting "Prefer Maximum Performance" in Nvidia control panel.

Basically every time a new level loaded or you paused or something it would drop to one GPU. Forcing it to prefer max performance forced it to use all four GPUs all the time.

I ran 480s in SLI back in the summer for a brief period and had no issues at all. Which took me aback tbh.
 
It was quite bad up until recently, amd are getting their act together with drivers and multi card fixes are coming out fairly quickly these days.

Radeon pro is a god send for crossfire, though I agree with Andy, one single powerful card would near always give better performance.
 
pgi947 said:
It was quite bad up until recently, amd are getting their act together with drivers and multi card fixes are coming out fairly quickly these days.
Click to expand...

If I had a pound for every time I have heard that I would be a millionaire.

Every ATI/AMD card I have ever had has had at least a few issues. Some were easily ignored, some not (like hard locking and a beep from my mobo's speaker).
 
I would never buy multi GPU from either camp until I stop seeing driver updates that say "+50% performance in game X for SLI/CFX users"

ie until this driver game X wasn't making full/good use of multi gpu
 
straxusii said:
I would never buy multi GPU from either camp until I stop seeing driver updates that say "+50% performance in game X for SLI/CFX users"

ie until this driver game X wasn't making full/good use of multi gpu
Click to expand...

Some games simply don't support it at a code level. You can force them to but some still don't like it.

Nvidia have more years of experience under their belts and it shows. They bought 3DFX and the Voodoo brands back in the late 90s early noughties and 3DFX were already relying (and failing) on dual GPUs.

The Voodoo 5500 had two and the ill fated never released 6000 series had four GPUs.

It has changed in how it works but it remains very similar. It isn't even Nvidia who had me sold on SLI it comes down to EVGA tbh. They have taken matters into their own hands and make sure to patch the drivers very quickly.

However I will say that a poorly optimised SLI is still light years ahead of CFX when it isn't working, but that could come down to the fact that when running SLI I have always used very high end powerful cards.
 
It depends if you are willing to put in the time and effort, if not, then forget it as it's not a simple case of plug it in and away you go.

£120 is a good price for a good boost, that will be hard to beat for the money, but be prepared for driver updates/caps if needed(same goes for SLi).

If you do decide to jump on board, as above Radeonpro is your friend, much like the Evga tool is for SLi.

I have had 2xSLi(Gigabyte 660 all in one hybrid job, 7800GT's) and 2XCrossFire(6950>70's and what's in the sig now) setups, they can all have problems, but that's the nature of the beast.

My 6950>70's were my favorite by far though as I made a custom bios with added voltage, disabled CCC limits and set profiles, none of the disable ulps chaos at times(but it could sorted now) to add voltage to the second gpu.

ALXAndy said:
However I will say that a poorly optimised SLI is still light years ahead of CFX when it isn't working, but that could come down to the fact that when running SLI I have always used very high end powerful cards.
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I think that's the biggest difference Andy, comparing 2x mid range gpu's in CrossFire, v's Nvidia's very best at the time in SLi puts the big boys in a better light.:)

(Your back, what did you do this time?:D)
 
I found SLI to be more robust overall that Crossfire although not by a massive amount. AMD are definitely massively improving from the days I crossfire'd 4850s and 5850s. My 7950 crossfire set up - allbeit one I didn't use for THAT long - was almost right on the money with a couple of workarounds needed.

680 SLI was perfection for me - shame the triple screen performance didn't hold up :D.

@OP - As mentioned above, I always think it to be more problems than its worth by crossfiring two low/mid range cards from the off because it leaves you no options later down the line. If you've got the money now for two mid range GPUs then you should really buy a high end GPU and then add another if/when it is required.

However, at this later point in time it's almost always a better option to upgrade to the latest card than it is to add the now older card into SLI/CF.
 
i was slightly hesitant about getting xfire but i decided to give it ago, i find its more of a hit or miss really, either they work well or they dont, works fine for me and i dont regret it one bit
 
Have some experience of 6950 CF (not mine) and GTX470 SLI (mine) side by side over a few months:

Only problems I had with the 470 SLI were that you'd get the odd driver that didn't get the best performance/smoothness out of them (usually betas) but there would always be a driver that worked fine. The odd game you'd be waiting for proper support in the drivers but it was mostly the exception rather than the rule and rarely if ever had to do any kind of lower level tweaking i.e. with 3rd party apps to make things work (which even as recent as GTX260 SLI I'd have to do a fair bit).

6950 CF generally worked ok - I'd even say in some ways it was more seamless in that when it worked it was more hidden under the hood - which is good from a consumers POV tho not always what an enthusiast wants. When it didn't work a lot more low level messing about required tho - more so than with SLI as AMD doesn't expose so much of the underlying functionality to the consumer. Various issues with clockspeeds/power management that required 3rd party applications and/or textfile/registry type edits. Lack of support in window mode and usually longer waits for support with new game releases. Earlier on wasn't unusual to get issues with flickering or other texture corruption on the initial release driver supporting a game tho this hasn't been an issue more recently. I wouldn't say it was a "bad" experience but it reminded me a lot of SLI back in the days when I ran 8800GT SLI. The owner of that setup since moved to a GTX660ti even tho its a little bit of a drop in performance.
 
Crossfire works great for me with 7970. The support for it in more recent driver revisions is excellent.
 
Crossfire was annoying the last time I used it, (5850s), the CP was sparse (no loading indicator, inability to change rendering modes, etc, etc,) oh, and it stuttered a lot.
Everyone always seemed to be waiting for the next set of magic drivers which broke something that was fine before. Things seemed to have improved dramatically now although I'd always go SLI over it, just personal preference, I'd rather pay a bit extra and spend my time gaming rather than fault finding.
 
Rusty0611 said:
I found SLI to be more robust overall that Crossfire although not by a massive amount. AMD are definitely massively improving from the days I crossfire'd 4850s and 5850s. My 7950 crossfire set up - allbeit one I didn't use for THAT long - was almost right on the money with a couple of workarounds needed.

680 SLI was perfection for me - shame the triple screen performance didn't hold up :D.

@OP - As mentioned above, I always think it to be more problems than its worth by crossfiring two low/mid range cards from the off because it leaves you no options later down the line. If you've got the money now for two mid range GPUs then you should really buy a high end GPU and then add another if/when it is required.

However, at this later point in time it's almost always a better option to upgrade to the latest card than it is to add the now older card into SLI/CF.
Click to expand...

Hi Rusty.
Would you be kind enough to just elaborate a little on your 680 SLI triple screen performance not holding up?
Thanks
 
Abz Hussain said:
Hi Rusty.
Would you be kind enough to just elaborate a little on your 680 SLI triple screen performance not holding up?
Thanks
Click to expand...

High resolutions require a wider memory bus than 256 bit really so the 680s performed OK and I was happy in most games to turn settings down but the far cheaper 7950s performed around 25% quicker over triple screens than 680s while both were 'max' overclocked.

In BF3 for example the 680 was 8% faster than the 7950 at 1920*1080. At 5760*1080 however the 7950s were 27% faster than the 680s which is a gigantic swing when you consider everything else was constant other than the resolution.

So price/performance problems with the 680s over triple screens rather than any actual fundamental problems with the set up itself.
 
It's always worked for me with 2 4850's,2 5850's and now 2 7970's. The 4800 xfire was a bit flakey but my 7970 is spot on. The drivers are a lot better now and with RadeoPro I dont notice any microstutter. True,some games require a tweak but I,personally,cannot fault it. I would say go for it
 
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