How many have given up on SLI/Crossfire?

mandaloris · 2 Nov 2011 at 11:39

moved from 4870x2 to 6950 xfire and couldn't be happier. No issues whatsoever and BF3 runs at 60fps smooth as you like

At 2560x1600 I don't really have much choice with single GPU anyway

mandaloris · 2 Nov 2011 at 11:42

schnipps said:
The heat is silly i agree, but saves me putting any heating on in the room.

yeah and who said that high end PCs can't be green?

JeffyB · 2 Nov 2011 at 11:45

I've certainly noticed more heat in my room now my 6990 is under water, with a full load temp of 41 degrees (was 85 on air) a lot more heat is being taken away from the card.

Jano · 2 Nov 2011 at 11:48

JeffyB said:
Crossfire has come on a long way since the 4 series, you cannot really base an opinion of multi gpu setups on experience with older cards. The heat and window mode are still the same.

Sorry but that is nonsense. Most of the issues I had were driver based, not down to the hardware. I had to go back to using one of my 4870's a little while ago and it is still a great card, giving more than reasonable fps and quality in recent games. The increase while in crossfire was minimal at best and for my purposes just was not worth it in any way shape and form.

What someone gets on a benchmark means absolutely nothing to me, I base my opinions on my experience. Based on that experience, going forward I will stick to the best single card set up I can afford, which is more than enough at this point in time.

bhavv · 2 Nov 2011 at 11:52

I've had crossfired / SLI'd:

Geforce 6800s
HD 3850s
HD 4850s
HD 4870s
HD 5770s
GTX 460s
GTX 560 tis

I've never had any microstutter or lag of any kind with them. My FPS was solid, and gameplay has always been incredibly smooth.

I dont get why people are so against SLI or Xfire.

JeffyB · 2 Nov 2011 at 11:54

bhavv seeing as you have had several multi gpu setups over the years how would say the tech has matured?

bhavv · 2 Nov 2011 at 12:01

JeffyB said:
bhavv seeing as you have had several multi gpu setups over the years how would say the tech has matured?

I get more FPS per card now. Its much more efficient than it used to be.

Also, it is much more widely supported, with just about every new game getting benefits from multiple GPUs.

The mid range cards I bought always ffered more price / perfomance than a single high end card ever did, also when I want the next gen, I stick them on ebay and buy new. Typically, mid range cards wont depriciate as much as high end ones, so you wont lose nor spend as much cash on the dual mid range card route as you would if you regularly upgrade a single high end card.

As far as I've always been able to tell, dual GPUs helps me far far more than more CPU cores does.

shuzzbutt · 2 Nov 2011 at 12:23

I remember adding a 2nd voodoo 2 16mb to my packard bell pc many years ago and it improved my half life experience dramatically! I then didnt dabble with pc's for years till I got my current sli setup when mafia 2 came out. Overall I'm happy though I have to say I do notice that gaming 'feels' smoother with a single card- however that now means turning down many settings even on my 1440x900 monitor

starkill3r · 2 Nov 2011 at 14:01

My 560 Ti SLI is fine, no stutter or lag.

Rroff · 2 Nov 2011 at 14:07

Last time I had any real issues with SLI was the 7950GX2, I've had 8800GT SLI, GTX260 SLI and GTX470 SLI since without any problems. Some of those setups you listed are some of the worst for microstutter tho - i.e. the 3850s with early drivers is pretty much what started the whole microstutter being an issue in the first place as it was dire on them for awhile - AMD still do bias on the side of performance over smoothness with crossfire but I've not really seen any stutter with 6950 CF (tho I've seen other issues with it).

Regarding tri-fire and microstutter - its not a magic bullet, the deal is here that the CPU is slower than the GPU capability which induces a more constant delay to rendering, reducing or eliminating the variance on the GPUs.

Cool Breeze · 2 Nov 2011 at 14:20

the only multi GPU setup I had that gave me issues were 2 x 8600gt,s upgraded from 2 6 series in SLI and I could not get them to play nice at all never found out why. So went with ati for years

3850's xifre
3870x2's quadfire
4870's xfire
single 6850

and now Im back in the green camp with 2 460gtx in SLI and no issues BF3 on high with SSAO I can vsync @ 60hz and get butter smooth gameplay I chose these over one 480 gtx as they offer more performance and run cooler.

To conclude only once has a multi gpu setup not met my expectations which isn't bad i would say.

hash70 · 2 Nov 2011 at 15:41

seems to differ from one from one setup to another,had 5870 cf last year,crackin setup,no stutter,switched to gtx480 sli and have had nothing but problems,so much so i leave sli disabled,some game are worse than other,but sli jst dodsent feel smooth,jerky and small stutters,wish id lept my 5870

ThomasTheTankEngine · 2 Nov 2011 at 15:54

I had SLI 7800's back in the day which weren't all that great. They were replaced with a single 8800.

Now I have CF 5850's and they're great. THe only single gpu that can compete with them is a gtx580, which costs practically the same as I paid for my setup 2 years ago and offers no real performance gain.

arc@css · 2 Nov 2011 at 16:16

I've had limited dual gpu experience (both times I owned dual gpu cards). The first was the Voodoo 5 64mb. I was so new to PC gaming then that I didn't even realise there was two graphics processors on the pcb. Those were the days when I had never heard of custom fan profiles, and after installation I would shut the case and rarely open it again, I never considered variables like temperature or such like.

My memory of that card's performance is probably too dulled down now to recall things accurately, though I remember enough to know that I had no major issues of any kind; great performance when AA was applied, smooth iirc and certainly no significant driver issues.

More recently I have had a 4870X2 which was a good card. I had few if any major driver issues, just on occasion some minor driver installation niggles, which may have been down to user error, but I can't be sure. I generally found it quite smooth in game play apart from the odd title, though this was rare, but I have to say that once I went to a single gpu it felt even smoother. My next venture into multi-gpu will likely be either tri-fire (if not then a top end single AMD gpu) or two cards in SLI. I haven't yet experienced Nvidia dual gpu and so that will likely be first choice. However, before I can consider any of that I will need to upgrade my mobo and cpu, and to be honest atm there seems little reason to, as everything runs to a high standard.

tommybhoy · 2 Nov 2011 at 16:18

7800GT SLI, flying when it worked, frustrating when it didn't because you just knew it had the potential. Some microstutter from time to time too, COD4 made me go mental at times because of it, but I put it down to new tech.

Nvidia was pretty poor implementing SLi profiles, you had to wait for months on end(if they even bothered) for a fix.

I imagine Ati were pretty poor for profiles too when Crossfire first appeared, so I'm not getting on Nvidia's case, just pointing out how it felt as a user at the time.

You could make your own SLI profile but most of the time it didn't do very much at all.

It frustrated me that much, I swore no more twin card set ups for me.

So, yes, I did give up on it...

...Until the good things said about unlocking and vastly improved scaling of the 6950's.

I'd say on a whole I've been more than happy with the performance of them so far.

Profiles seem to be up and running on game release apart from Witcher 2(iirc 8 days to get a profile) and Crysis 2(last minute code change by Crytek broke it,

Crytek) but on the whole, quite quick and if all else fails there's Radeon pro(although doesn't work for me with OpenGl titles).

Very stable, zero micro stuttering using [email protected] and 2500K@stock/4.5GHz. Microstuttering was very evident though, using a 555BE@stock, but gone when @3.9GHZ with 3 cores.

Rroff said:
Last time I had any real issues with SLI was the 7950GX2, I've had 8800GT SLI, GTX260 SLI and GTX470 SLI since without any problems. Some of those setups you listed are some of the worst for microstutter tho - i.e. the 3850s with early drivers is pretty much what started the whole micro stutter being an issue in the first place as it was dire on them for awhile - AMD still do bias on the side of performance over smoothness with crossfire but I've not really seen any stutter with 6950 CF (tho I've seen other issues with it).

Regarding tri-fire and microstutter - its not a magic bullet, the deal is here that the CPU is slower than the GPU capability which induces a more constant delay to rendering, reducing or eliminating the variance on the GPUs.

Rroff, most of the time I read your posts with great enthusiasm as I can be enlightened with information that I never had a clue about, It's great it really is!

Then you go from being a very informative poster to going on about how rubbish Ati is.

Take the above point, you had issues with your 7950GX2(maybe micro stuttering

) that you don't elaborate about, then you put the boot in and misinform guys here that may not know any better that the 3850's 'pretty much' introduced micro stuttering when it's simply untrue.

Most of the time a simple case of enabling tripple buffering/vsync on and it becomes a non-issue(unless your playing mp fps).

Then, in you come with the other boot about amd's bias on performance over quality. Then with probably this gens best scaling cards, there's other issues with it too!

C'mon man, most of us know you how much your into Nvidia but it's not healthy mate!

iBSOD · 2 Nov 2011 at 16:27

Well, I've had SLI for half a year now (I was using a SLI mod for 4 months on my AM3 board) and I've NEVER had any problems. I haven't run any benchmarks before and after though so I don't know what I'm missing.

arc@css · 2 Nov 2011 at 16:31

iBSOD said:
(I was using a SLI mod for 4 months on my AM3 board)

I remember a post on here once about a hack to get SLI working on a crossfire motherboard, such as in my case. At the time I bookmarked it in case I was to get two Nvidia gpu's nearer that time, though I never did. Reading your post does make me think about it once again, since I have tended to hear quite encouraging things.

Krony · 2 Nov 2011 at 17:43

Running Sli 3Gb 580's and no issues here, will probably add a 3rd next year if i decide to upgrade to LGA 2011.

ET900 · 2 Nov 2011 at 18:35

ive had one sli setup 2x8800gtx. didnt get micro stuttering issues but framerates were bearely any different. i had a crap psu though so probably was that.

then ive had one crossfire setup which im currently running for another day or 2 until my toxic 6950 arrives. this setup is 2x 4870 1gb. in bad company 2 it works amazingly, so impressed! but with battlefield 3 the framerate may be higher than with a single card but the game just feels jerky and unresponsive at pretty much anything below 50fps. so weird to have a game feeling sketchy at 40fps! i also get weird green flickers to.

not impressed overall but apparently the 6 series cards are much better for crossfire, i dont know how true that is but i hear it a lot. im probably gonna crossfire my 6950 next year at some point so will see then.

i never aim for a crossfire setup to begin with but it can be a cheap and worthy upgrade to pair up with your 1-2 year old card as you can get them pretty cheap secondhand once they've dated a bit.

Rroff · 2 Nov 2011 at 18:47

tommybhoy said:
Rroff, most of the time I read your posts with great enthusiasm as I can be enlightened with information that I never had a clue about, It's great it really is!

Then you go from being a very informative poster to going on about how rubbish Ati is.

Take the above point, you had issues with your 7950GX2(maybe micro stuttering ) that you don't elaborate about, then you put the boot in and misinform guys here that may not know any better that the 3850's 'pretty much' introduced micro stuttering when it's simply untrue.

Most of the time a simple case of enabling tripple buffering/vsync on and it becomes a non-issue(unless your playing mp fps).

Then, in you come with the other boot about amd's bias on performance over quality. Then with probably this gens best scaling cards, there's other issues with it too!

C'mon man, most of us know you how much your into Nvidia but it's not healthy mate!

Well to elaborate... issues with 7950GX2 and SLI in general at that time were due mostly to having to use nHancer to create profiles manually for quite a lot of games that didn't work with SLI out the box or nVidia hadn't yet released drivers for, or they'd run slower with both cards enabled... microstutter was only an issue in low framerate situations.

What I meant with the 38xx crossfire was it pretty much introduced microstutter to the mainstream, earlier drivers for those GPUs suffered from very noticeable microstutter - before that no one cared about it at all - unfortunatly some people then tried to tar all multi GPU setups with the microstutter brush to obfusicate the issue those 38xx cards had in crossfire (later drivers sorted it) - not saying microstutter doesn't exist on other setups just that for the most part its not as noticeable generally as these people were trying to make out.

There is actually an article where there are statements from both nVidia and AMD on microstutter in regards to their cards, where AMD says they consider higher performance of more value to their customers over the potential microstutter issues and nVidia said they use low level frametime control (artificial delay) to reduce it as much as possible even when it means lower performance in benchmarks, which backs up my claims awhile back and also where I'm coming from in that regard - its not something I just made up coz "I like to" bash AMD.