Crossfire Worth it?

[JHONO]

Currently got a 6970 (see spec) but was thinking of throwing another card in crossfire. Thing is does it have to be another 6970, or could i possibly use a 6870 or something?

Reason being for this is i im running BF3 on 1920x1080 with textures on high and the rest on medium, and 4x AA. Getting 50-60 FPS most of the time which is good, can drop into the 40s when things get heated etc.

Im just curious to know really if popping another card in crossfire will make this run at a stright 60, bearing in mind that the second PCI-E port on my board is only 8x.

Would i see an increase increase or is it not worth it?

Thanks

 

[ThePengu1n]

I run XFire 6950s and I'd say it's worth it. You can XFire your 6970 with the following:

6950, 6970, 6990

Running at 8x 8x bandwith is not an issue (makes maybe 3fps difference if you're unlucky compared to 16x 16x)

It can cause lots of issues for some people, but your single 6970 is good enough, so if you ever had to disable XFire, you'd be ok. It's up to you really, whether or not you want to spend the cash? The other option is, sell your 6970 and get a 7950/7970 instead

 

[ALXAndy]

More noise.
More heat.
More power.
Reliance on drivers and profiles.
Frame rates you won't detect over one powerful card.
Micro stutter.
All out failure (some games simply won't work properly until heavily patched)
Worse than single GPU results (it happens sometimes)

Personally I don't see a point. You're better off selling the card you have if it's not fast enough and then replacing it with a faster card (7950 or 7970).

However, from my own personal experience one 6970 was more than man enough to run anything I tried at 1080p. It was only because it failed coupled with a frightfully good piece of fortune that I decided to go 7970.

 

[Final8y]

More noise.
More heat.
More power.
Reliance on drivers and profiles.
Frame rates you won't detect over one powerful card.
Micro stutter.
All out failure (some games simply won't work properly until heavily patched)
Worse than single GPU results (it happens sometimes)

Personally I don't see a point. You're better off selling the card you have if it's not fast enough and then replacing it with a faster card (7950 or 7970).

However, from my own personal experience one 6970 was more than man enough to run anything I tried at 1080p. It was only because it failed coupled with a frightfully good piece of fortune that I decided to go 7970.

Your first 4 in the list without question and everything else are possible issues pending on the setup and game.
But you come across with multi GPU as telling everyone who smokes will die of cancer and everyone who drinks will die of liver disease.
I have no issues with warning people of the possible issues, but you really do make it sound far worse.

 

[JHONO]

Hi thanks for the replies

Im going to stick with what ive got for now, as theres nothing up with it, i dont think Xfire is worth the hassle really, im thinking of saving a little more then in a few months from now if im still playing BF3 il invest in a 7950/7970

Thanks

 

[ALXAndy]

Your first 4 in the list without question and everything else are possible issues pending on the setup and game.
But you come across with multi GPU as telling everyone who smokes will die of cancer and everyone who drinks will die of liver disease.
I have no issues with warning people of the possible issues, but you really do make it sound far worse.

It's better to be honest. Everything I posted can be an issue.

The problem is that the flipside of it is basically a bunch of people who have Crossfire and therefore will omit a lot of truth and rave about how fantastic it is. They are clearly bias.

I don't run Crossfire because I found it to be all of what I listed and more. It was a pain in the backside.

 

[1uke]

I've used various Xfire setups for the last 6 years and never really had any of those problems, And certainly gained a lot of performance over running a single card plus normally the best value for money option.
Obviously temperatures of the top card will probably be greater, But I have always upgraded the standard coolers on graphics anyway as standard they are to loud and generally inefficient.

But to be honest it doesn't sound like you really need to upgrade quite yet with those frame rates.

 

[se_vietboi]

It's better to be honest. Everything I posted can be an issue.

The problem is that the flipside of it is basically a bunch of people who have Crossfire and therefore will omit a lot of truth and rave about how fantastic it is. They are clearly bias.

I don't run Crossfire because I found it to be all of what I listed and more. It was a pain in the backside.

Would be helpful to also post the advantages of Xfire whereas you only warned him of faults - making you look bias also.

 

[Final8y]

It's better to be honest. Everything I posted can be an issue.

The problem is that the flipside of it is basically a bunch of people who have Crossfire and therefore will omit a lot of truth and rave about how fantastic it is. They are clearly bias.

I don't run Crossfire because I found it to be all of what I listed and more. It was a pain in the backside.

Where did i omit the truth ?
What your seeing are people who generally had a much better experience than you, none of us would be using it on average if we went through what happened to you with multi GPU.

And there is no need to be defending our purchase because we have had plenty of opportunity to drop Multi GPU many times, its not like its our first time and its crap but hey don't want to look silly.
The negatives have been discussed many times and myself posting reviews threads about micro stuttering.

 

[ALXAndy]

Would be helpful to also post the advantages of Xfire whereas you only warned him of faults - making you look bias also.

I'm sure he would be aware of the advantages no? They're pretty obvious.

So I didn't feel the need to point out anything but the caveats.

If Crossfire worked first time, all the time, every time I would still be using it.

Sadly my gaming pals all got very tired of me asking them to wait whilst I messed around with settings.

 

[Final8y]

I'm sure he would be aware of the advantages no? They're pretty obvious.

So I didn't feel the need to point out anything but the caveats.

If Crossfire worked first time, all the time, every time I would still be using it.

Sadly my gaming pals all got very tired of me asking them to wait whilst I messed around with settings.

The OP asked if he would be getting more FPS in BF3, you didn't say a thing in regards.

 

[BaDBoY_uK]

Yes. Don't listen to nabs. /thread

 

[1uke]

With 1x 5850 in Bf3 I get around 30fps. With Crossfire 5850's I get around 60fps its pretty simple really. No micro stutter or anything else for me just pure performance boost.

Only thing that would make me think twice if I was in your position is Memory but as you have a 2gb card? That's plenty for now at your resolution.

 

[tommybhoy]

1 year living with 6950>70 CrossFire, stable, incredible performance, faster than a heavily oc'ed 7970@1080p most of the time...

...but hey, I'm clearly biased.

Seriously though, although my comments above sums it up for me, there are others who would through it at you.

ALXAndy was painting a picture of generally the worst case scenario(it's up to him what he throws at us in the forum after all), but he maybe could inform the masses of folks who ask for help that it can also achieve almost double the performance in quite a lot of AAA titles now.

Iirc, ALXAndy has had experience with older series SLi/CrossFire,where reliability/stability/CTD/Bluescreen plagued both camps, but they have upped their efforts a whole, whole lot!

Nvidia nailed it from the 4 series and Amd rolled their sleeves up for the first time and achieved incredible scaling from the 69** series, they really made a huge effort with the points above on release, for a much better enjoyable experience, I mean they wouldn't sell anywhere near as much as they do if it was still utter rubbish.

If you check up reviews of 69** CrossFire, the performance increase speaks for itself.

I made a video below on BF3, FPS have increased quite a bit with newer patches/drivers/servers, so take a look.

This was posted at all the moaning about CrossFire performance being utter rubbish at the time:

I thought I would post a small video of Battlefield 3 multiplayer Caspian Border Gameplay performance of my unlocked 6950 shaders @ 6970 clocks in Crossfire.

Benchmarks are all over the place with many discrepancies imo.

There are a few posts saying that 6970 Crossfire is not enough @1080p with Ultra settings, well you can decide for yourselves now.

Specs are:

Battlefield 3 AMD Crossfire Performance
Full Caspian 64 Player Map
Ultra Settings
In game fps using console command:
'Render.DrawFps 1 Boolean'

Amd 6950>70 Crossfire @ 880MHz/1350Mhz
Catalyst 11.10 preview2 + Cap3 Win7
2500K@ 4.5GHz
MSI Z68A-GD55-G3
16GB Corsair Vengeance Red 1866 Mhz
128GB Crucial M4-Windows
120GB Corsair Force 3-BF3
Windows Pagefile is disabled(I don't know if this helps with the stuttering but I've never had any)



This may help if you are trying to decide whether 6950/70's Crossfire is for you or whether it's worth adding a second card.

Yes the videos not centred, that wasn't the point.

Remember it's better now, never going under 60FPS@1080 max everything on Full Ultra.

The other thing to note about my experience with driver support on my setup is that apart from BF3, I rarely jump on release day titles titles as driver support can be lacking for single gpu's never mind CrossFire CAPs, and I tend to finish a game first before going on to the next title.