MSI 290X LE quick review and thoughts

[ALXAndy]

I hope that makes sense?

So in a nutshell, I won't be going 3 cards again and CF or SLI only.

Whoever said 3-4 cards ever did anything for gaming was quite clearly bonkers.

It's bad enough getting two supported but three and four? only about five games support it natively at best.

It's hard enough getting devs to support two, let alone three and four.

The only time you would ever need more than two is for benchmarking.

 

[Uncle Petey]

#finalword

 

[Kaapstad]

Whoever said 3-4 cards ever did anything for gaming was quite clearly bonkers.

It's bad enough getting two supported but three and four? only about five games support it natively at best.

There is a lot more than five lol

Do not confuse CPU bottleneck with lack of support.

Hitman
Sleeping Dogs
SEV2
SEV3
BF4
BF3
Crysis 3
Thief
Tomb Raider
RTW2

The above are some of the common ones used on these forums.

All the Dirt and Grid games support 4 cards but you would have to use 3 x 4k to avoid a CPU bottleneck.

 

[ALXAndy]

There is a lot more than five lol

Do not confuse CPU bottleneck with lack of support.

Hitman
Sleeping Dogs
SEV2
SEV3
BF4
BF3
Crysis 3
Thief
Tomb Raider
RTW2

The above are some of the common ones used on these forums.

All the Dirt and Grid games support 4 cards but you would have to use 3 x 4k to avoid a CPU bottleneck.

I'm not confusing anything. Most of those games there do not support more than two cards. All you're seeing is a driver attempting to make it work.

The only games I know that officially support more than two cards are DICE's games and I count three of those. The rest? it's all a bodge.

I've covered this before. For a game dev to make a game that specifically supports more than two GPUs they need to code in the support. And it takes too much time and costs too much money to bother with.

In fact, we've only even so much as covered half of the story. Whilst there are a tiny handful of games that were coded to understand it most are not. As thus, you end up getting worse performance in most games by running three GPUs than you do running two.

I'm not having a go at you Kaap. That's actually the furthest thing from my mind, I'm just pointing out that in gaming you'd be pretty insane to think that adding more GPUs over two could actually net you anything at all.

So what I mean is this - if you're benchmarking or just do it for the fun of it then hats off to you. Been there, done that. I bought two 3870x2 for £50 each and have had the 'go' at it and gained the experience and it wasn't a good experience. It was awful. I tested ten or more games and the only one that actually showed any gains over one 3870x2 (because the rest nose dived worse than one card but two GPU cores) was BFBC2 which actually was pretty insane. It beat my two 5770s which was remarkable.

But as I said, please don't encourage more than two GPUs for gaming. For benchmarking, fun, experience points? absolutely, but for gaming? fuhgeddaboudit.

 

[Uncle Petey]

I'm not confusing anything. Most of those games there do not support more than two cards. All you're seeing is a driver attempting to make it work.

Sorry, what?
Either they scale with multiple cards or they don't. The games in the above list do.

 

[ALXAndy]

Sorry, what?
Either they scale with multiple cards or they don't. The games in the above list do.

They may scale with a driver that forces it but they do not officially support it.

IE - if and when a game is actually hard coded to work with multiple GPUs it works a whole hell of a lot better than a driver trying to force the issue.

I'm talking about code level, Pete. And I can promise you that pretty much none of those games listed actually had it coded in in hard code to make it work.

My good old 1% analogy rings true again. PC gamers are 1% of PC owners. PC gamers with two GPUs are about 5% of that, PC gamers with more than two GPUs are about 1% of that.

Tell me, would you get your dev team (who probably earn $50,000 a year minimum EACH) to sit down and spend three weeks to a month to bother coding for such an audience? or would you not bother, launch the game any way and leave Nvidia to scramble around trying to make it work?

It makes no viable sense whatsoever to support more than two GPUs and thus it makes no sense to buy more than two GPUs.

It will never become the norm ever I promise you that.

 

[Uncle Petey]

I totally appreciate that it's a very niche audience and I don't really expect everything that comes out to support more than two (sometimes lucky to get even that tbh).

Fair enough, if it's not supported at the code level then sure.
As far as I'm concerned, if it works, it works. Look at the scaling you can get on TR for example. If that's purely down to driver implementation, then good job and moar of it please

 

[ALXAndy]

I totally appreciate that it's a very niche audience and I don't really expect everything that comes out to support more than two (sometimes lucky to get even that tbh).

Fair enough, if it's not supported at the code level then sure.
As far as I'm concerned, if it works, it works. Look at the scaling you can get on TR for example. If that's purely down to driver implementation, then good job and moar of it please

Well when I did my 3870x2 x 2 experiment it was clear that having more than two cores actually damaged performance even over one. I was assured that Crysis would fly, it didn't. Fallout 3 was just pure micro stutter.

BFBC2 however? dear god, it was savage. I literally got 100% scaling over all four GPUs It was something like 50% faster than two 5770s in the same game..

But sadly it's just one of those things like Physx and 3d that were doomed to fail because of the cost and end user count. I mean at least with 3d it's easy to just disable it and carry on. With more than two GPU cores it's very hard.

I did run Quad SLI too by ways of two 295 single PCB but again core support was scant. However, at least with Quad SLI disabling specific cards and cores was far, far easier than trying to tune the AMD set up.

The main issue I had in Quad SLI (other than the power consumption lol) was it dropping off all of the time. So for example I start to play Fallout 3 and it goes OK. Then I go into a new room/building and all of a sudden it runs like ass. At first I fixed it by alt tab to and fro, but that soon got annoying. In the end I had to force the driver to "Prefer maximum performance" and pretty much nailed it down as a down clocking/not clocking back up again/ issue with the driver itself.

As I said, I'm not berating any one for buying three or four GPUs, 200 Titans (snigger) or anything else. Fair play and the experience is worth the outlay if you try it for cheaps.

Just don't expect it to actually work in gaming.

Edit. ID Rage was probably the best game of all for Quad SLI, but then Carmack is a bit of a tech geek himself so you can see why he would make it all work good

 

[Final8y]

They may scale with a driver that forces it but they do not officially support it.

Gain is gain i dont care if its because of the game or the driver and the majority of the time i see a gains over 2 GPUs in CF. SLi is a different matter

 

[Uncle Petey]

Were 3870x2 and 295's the last setup you tried with more than two gpu's, Andy?

 

[ALXAndy]

Gain is gain i dont care if its because of the game or the driver and the majority of the time i see a gains over 2 GPUs in CF, sli can be another matter.

For the gain you get though it isn't worth all of the extra outlay on electricity, cooling, better PSU, etc etc.

These are the reasons why people don't do it and why in nearly 10 years of it it hasn't caught on (more than 2 I mean).

I mean blimey, as if dealing with the heat of an extra one card wasn't enough.

Were 3870x2 and 295's the last setup you tried with more than two gpu's, Andy?

Yes but I tried them far more recently than you may think, so they were running on very mature drivers. For example, Quad SLI was 2012. Not that long ago and pretty much nothing has changed since.

I wish it worked. I wish it was easily affordable, doable and worked well. I mean logically if you can add another GPU why not add two or three more?

Because of the support. I've got mags here with articles interviewing game devs and they pretty much laughed at it. Why spend, for example, $20,000 when it will only be $20k lost?

And Final8y.

You're doing it again. You know? romanticising it making it sound like it's nothing but good. What about when it doesn't work and screws up your gaming? what about the heat? what about the noise? what about the power consumption?

ETC, ETC really. You're forgetting I've tried it. Tried it, realised it to be what it was, stopped using it.

 

[Meladath]

For the gain you get though it isn't worth all of the extra outlay on electricity, cooling, better PSU, etc etc.

These are the reasons why people don't do it and why in nearly 10 years of it it hasn't caught on (more than 2 I mean).

I mean blimey, as if dealing with the heat of an extra one card wasn't enough.



Yes but I tried them far more recently than you may think, so they were running on very mature drivers. For example, Quad SLI was 2012. Not that long ago and pretty much nothing has changed since.

I wish it worked. I wish it was easily affordable, doable and worked well. I mean logically if you can add another GPU why not add two or three more?

Because of the support. I've got mags here with articles interviewing game devs and they pretty much laughed at it. Why spend, for example, $20,000 when it will only be $20k lost?

And Final8y.

You're doing it again. You know? romanticising it making it sound like it's nothing but good. What about when it doesn't work and screws up your gaming? what about the heat? what about the noise? what about the power consumption?

ETC, ETC really. You're forgetting I've tried it. Tried it, realised it to be what it was, stopped using it.

The fact that you were using cards which are very old do not show a good representation of using cards now.

Hawaii in particular has outstanding scaling while tahiti is not as good, even with the same drivers. There are way more factors.
Personally I think 3 cards is pretty crappy right now too, but say for example, you only play BF4 with 3 2560 x 1440 144Hz monitors and you want to use mantle? 2 hawaii cards might require you to turn down the settings, but 3 could smoke it, so they would be an excellent choice there. Power consumption would be high, but not absurd, around 1000W running furmark, as long as you can disperse the heat, which isn't too hard with good airflow, whats the problem?

 

[Final8y]

For the gain you get though it isn't worth all of the extra outlay on electricity, cooling, better PSU, etc etc.

These are the reasons why people don't do it and why in nearly 10 years of it it hasn't caught on (more than 2 I mean).

I mean blimey, as if dealing with the heat of an extra one card wasn't enough.



Yes but I tried them far more recently than you may think, so they were running on very mature drivers. For example, Quad SLI was 2012. Not that long ago and pretty much nothing has changed since.

I wish it worked. I wish it was easily affordable, doable and worked well. I mean logically if you can add another GPU why not add two or three more?

Because of the support. I've got mags here with articles interviewing game devs and they pretty much laughed at it. Why spend, for example, $20,000 when it will only be $20k lost?

And Final8y.

You're doing it again. You know? romanticising it making it sound like it's nothing but good. What about when it doesn't work and screws up your gaming? what about the heat? what about the noise? what about the power consumption?

ETC, ETC really. You're forgetting I've tried it. Tried it, realised it to be what it was, stopped using it.

I have not forgotten you have tried but your experience is different from mine, i haven't even had 1 quarter of the issues you seem to have when it comes to multi GPU which is something that you consistently disregard when it comes to others and i have been doing it for longer over more generations and im talking about CF not SLi and what is worth it is down to the individual.

2560x1600 1x5970 Ares CF 2x5970 Ares quadfire Ares 5970+5870 TriFire

The review is old and so are the drivers, much has changed since then, but that's basically my Quadfire setup.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/ARES_CrossFire/1.html


19 games tested some of them with no AA which does not help eliminate CPU bottlenecking which is running at 3.8Ghz., the more GPUs you have the greater the potential driver overhead.

Out of 19 games tested Quadfire is ahead of TriFire in 14 of them and about equal in the rest.

Out of 19 games tested Quadfire negative scales to worse than CF in 2 by a tiny margin.

Quadfire negative scales to 3 frames worse 138.6 fps than CF 141.9 fps in CODMW.

Quadfire negative scales to 2 frames worse 224.3 fps than CF 226.3 fps in Quake4 No AA


So in that review out of 19 games only 2 were worse with more than 2 GPUs.

 

[Uncle Petey]

For the gain you get though it isn't worth all of the extra outlay on electricity, cooling, better PSU, etc etc.

These are the reasons why people don't do it and why in nearly 10 years of it it hasn't caught on (more than 2 I mean).

I mean blimey, as if dealing with the heat of an extra one card wasn't enough.


Yes but I tried them far more recently than you may think, so they were running on very mature drivers. For example, Quad SLI was 2012. Not that long ago and pretty much nothing has changed since.

I wish it worked. I wish it was easily affordable, doable and worked well. I mean logically if you can add another GPU why not add two or three more?

Because of the support. I've got mags here with articles interviewing game devs and they pretty much laughed at it. Why spend, for example, $20,000 when it will only be $20k lost?

As far as heat is concerned, most people running three or more tend to go with water anyway. If not, they sort out their airflow and use blowers, which obviously can be a bit a bit noisy.
Yes, it uses more leccy and requires a bigger psu etc, but hey, it's an enthusiast thing and most people know what they're getting into. At least I hope they do

I'd say that things have changed a bit more than you might think tbh. The difference between 79xx dual/tri/quad is quite apparent compared to the equivalent 290/x experience for example. That's just a single generation apart and isn't just down to raw performance figures and more vram.

I'm not advocating that everyone should go out and grab three of whichever card btw, but whatever the method used to get multi card scaling on the go in the above list of games is, it works. That's all I'm saying.
Yes, it would be nice to see it in more titles though.

 

[ALXAndy]

As far as heat is concerned, most people running three or more tend to go with water anyway. If not, they sort out their airflow and use blowers, which obviously can be a bit a bit noisy.
Yes, it uses more leccy and requires a bigger psu etc, but hey, it's an enthusiast thing and most people know what they're getting into. At least I hope they do

I'd say that things have changed a bit more than you might think tbh. The difference between 79xx dual/tri/quad is quite apparent compared to the equivalent 290/x experience for example. That's just a single generation apart and isn't just down to raw performance figures and more vram.

I'm not advocating that everyone should go out and grab three of whichever card btw, but whatever the method used to get multi card scaling on the go in the above list of games is, it works. That's all I'm saying.
Yes, it would be nice to see it in more titles though.

Yeah they go water. Which adds another issue. What % of people are using a custom loop? very, very few.

For it ever have worked it would need to be easy and economical. Which it just isn't.

For me to add another two Titan Blacks I'd be looking at two grand by the time you add in the extra cards and loops etc. Most people don't even spend that on a rig. In fact, most spend £1000 like I did before I got this rig (stroke of luck).

At least on Nvidia it was easy to switch off cores etc. Impossible on AMD though arguably I did Quadfire in 2009.

 

[Kaapstad]

Crysis 3 looks fantastic on 4 GPUs.

 

[ALXAndy]

I have not forgotten you have tried but your experience is different from mine Which is something that you consistently disregard when it comes to others and i have been doing it for longer over more generations and what is worth it is down to the individual.

2560x1600 1x5970 Ares CF 2x5970 Ares quadfire Ares 5970+5870 TriFire

The review is old and so are the drivers, much has changed since then, but that's basically my Quadfire setup.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/ARES_CrossFire/1.html


19 games tested some of them with no AA which does not help eliminate CPU bottlenecking which is running at 3.8Ghz., the more GPUs you have the greater the potential driver overhead.

Out of 19 games tested Quadfire is ahead of TriFire in 14 of them and about equal in the rest.

Out of 19 games tested Quadfire negative scales to worse than CF in 2 by a tiny margin.

Quadfire negative scales to 3 frames worse 138.6 fps than CF 141.9 fps in CODMW.

Quadfire negative scales to 2 frames worse 224.3 fps than CF 226.3 fps in Quake4 No AA

Every one used to tell me they had a different experience to me when it came to Crossfire.

IE - when I was going out of my nut because it was awful people were assuring me it was actually me and it was fine on their rig.

Who was right? me.

Some people are completely numb when it comes to issues. Me? I spot them, trust me. One stutter, one crash, one drop in performance I will notice it straight away.

Can't even believe that many didn't even realising what tearing was because they didn't notice it.

It's something I'm glad I tried but would never touch it again unless I was chasing benchmarks and world records. For gaming it just doesn't work.

If it did it would be far more widespread today than it was ten years ago. Fact is it's still the same people using it now who used it then - IE gotta have the best benchmark scores and push for records.

And that's fine. As I said I'm not berating any one who chooses to play because I've had a go myself but a technology that will become mainstream it ain't.

Never was and never will be.

 

[Uncle Petey]

Enabling/disabling cards is actually easier with AMD these days
You go to CCC and choose which ones you want to use. Simple as that.

The point is that it doesn't necessarily need to implemented in the game code to begin with. Like you say, most of those don't, yet drivers have enabled them to achieve great scaling. I don't see the problem here.

Crysis 3 looks fantastic on 4 GPUs.

I did my first complete playthrough maxed out with trifire. T'was awesome

 

[ALXAndy]

Crysis 3 looks fantastic on 4 GPUs.

Silly comment. It 'looks' the same no matter what it's running on providing visual settings are all the same.

 

[Uncle Petey]

Silly comment. It 'looks' the same no matter what it's running on providing visual settings are all the same.

Not really.

If you want to max it out and achieve good fps, then you'll need more than a couple of cards.
Yes, you could max it out and it'll 'look' the same with less gpu power, but framerates will be arse.