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SLI or Xfire???
- Thread starter katana6434
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- 6 Oct 2006
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- Luton
Well, I will see how it goes when I get another 7970 early next year.
Is this your personal opinion from experience or are you just repeating
what you've heard ?
I've just swapped from Sli to Crossfire and apart from taking a little longer to
set things up and get everything running smoothly I have no regrets.
To be honest the issues I'm having is from lack of knowledge
on using AMD and Crossfire,
as this is the first time owning AMD
Just my 2c's
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^^ I have some direct comparision experience - I've had GTX470 SLI for quite awhile now and during the same time my brother had 6950CF on almost identical setups other than the GPUs and motherboard.
Hes now using a GTX660 and happier with it thats all I'm gonna say.
EDIT: Tho to be fair his main reason for changing, tho not the only one, was that he likes to play MMOs, etc. in window mode with other chat programs, etc. running alongside which doesn't work with crossfire.
Hes now using a GTX660 and happier with it thats all I'm gonna say.
EDIT: Tho to be fair his main reason for changing, tho not the only one, was that he likes to play MMOs, etc. in window mode with other chat programs, etc. running alongside which doesn't work with crossfire.
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Soldato
- Joined
- 29 Feb 2012
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- London
I think your better off waiting until next year for the 8000 AMD series or the 700 series Nvidia the performance are going to be awesome! i read somewhere that next years mid range cards will be better than this years top single GPU'S.
Probably only 3 or 4 months to go
Probably only 3 or 4 months to go
The performance increase is rumoured to be roughly 15% - AMD & Nvidia wouldn't shoot themselves in the foot
Man of Honour
- Joined
- 21 Nov 2004
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- 47,188
AMD driver support for Xfire is very poor - Nvidia always seems to be ahead of the game when it comes to support for new releases. That is my experience anyway.
Is this your personal opinion from experience or are you just repeating
what you've heard ?
I've just swapped from Sli to Crossfire and apart from taking a little longer to
set things up and get everything running smoothly I have no regrets.
To be honest the issues I'm having is from lack of knowledge
on using AMD and Crossfire,
as this is the first time owning AMD
Just my 2c's
No that is my experience since 1992 ive been using both brands(3dfx and others), I gave up on ATI/AMD years and years ago as there cards when paired up were always a massive fail for me.
Great on there own but once you go cfx the problems come and they also dont work well out of the box regarding catalyst profiles unlike nvidias control panel and even more superior Nvidia inspector
You have to wait for gaming profiles to be released which normally breaks something else in the process, One step forwards and another step backwards was my experience which is why dumped ATI long ago.
No that is my experience since 1992 ive been using both brands(3dfx and others), I gave up on ATI/AMD years and years ago as there cards when paired up were always a massive fail for me.
Great on there own but once you go cfx the problems come and they also dont work well out of the box regarding catalyst profiles unlike nvidias control panel and even more superior Nvidia inspector
You have to wait for gaming profiles to be released which normally breaks something else in the process, One step forwards and another step backwards was my experience which is why dumped ATI long ago.
Fair enough
- Joined
- 6 Oct 2006
- Posts
- 375
- Location
- Luton
Well at the end of the day I will give it a try. I will be running one 7970 for a bit and will then add another.
If it proves to be a complete pain then i will change them out...
I've heard good things that the AMD driver support has got better now, but I guess i will wait and see.
If it proves to be a complete pain then i will change them out...
I've heard good things that the AMD driver support has got better now, but I guess i will wait and see.
Define "very poor".
They're pretty much the same on average when it comes to new releases.
Sometimes nVidia has an SLi profile ready and AMD don't have a crossfire one, and sometimes AMD have a crossfire profile ready when nVidia don't have an SLi one.
Are your claims based on a situation where you didn't get the support you wanted?
Man of Honour
- Joined
- 21 Nov 2004
- Posts
- 47,188
New game is released, AMD either haven't got a driver ready or release one that gives low fps - to the point of having to disable xfire. I very rarely get all of the performance out of my 6990 purely down to the fact that the drivers are poorly optimised. That is the best answer I can give.
If I was upgrading now, I would be torn between the best value from AMD or better driver support from Nvidia - at the very least I would probably stick to a single gpu solution. Having owned three onboard xfire cards in a row all I can say is that they give me a headache, and always because of the drivers.
There was never really anything wrong with AMD driver support.
It's weird, but for some reason nVidia driver issues are very rarely acknowledged by people. They're all too happy to forget or ignore them while claiming AMD has issues it needs to fix.
From an objective standpoint, nVidia has a worse track record with bad drivers than AMD, but as above people tend to pretend they don't.
nVidia have messed up big time on multiple occasions that are all worse than the issues people ever claim AMD has. Drivers that killed graphics cards dead (turned the fans off and let them overheat to death, for example).
Other drivers that killed GTX590 dead, burning out a specific component.
The Vista release drivers (basically they didn't work at all for games, it took a class action lawsuit for nVidia to even acknowledge it).
The GTX6 series stuttering issues that they refused to acknowledge for a while.
PhysX drivers, where they intentionally stop it from working if an AMD card is detected in your PC.
Or that nVidia drivers were responsible for 30% of Windows Vista BSODs in a single year.
Just to name a few things.
AMD and nVidia both have driver issue from time to time, but it get tiresome hearing people wheel out the same unsubstantiated nonsense that AMD has a track record of bad drivers when that title belongs to nVidia.
Granted, the vast majority of people will be fine and not get many issues with drivers with any brand.
The whole profile issue happens with AMD and nVidia. Maybe because you've only got an AMD card you can only really reference that, but that's the way multi GPU set ups can be.
That said, I can't say I've had many of those issues over the years of running multiple graphics cards.
That's why i read the Offcial NV forum even though i have AMD GPUs and some of the issues i flat out could not put up with.
No it's not. I'm saying for the most part the experience will be the same, but nVidia has had some serious driver issues that people like to pretend never happened, far worse than any of AMD's driver issues, yet people like to claim AMD are notorious for driver issues.
That's beside the point of the general experience being the same.
Exactly, and yet AMD are the ones who get accused of having dodgy drivers. That's why I've been convinced for a long time that the whole "AMD has bad drivers" thing is a ploy ran by that awful nVidia focus group to take the attention off nVidia's driver mishaps.
It's one of those things, if it's repeated enough by people it becomes "true" to people.
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The thing is your not weighting the issues properly. If you take a generalised look at the last few years or so you see that ATI/AMD problems tend to have a wider impact on their customer base and take longer to be resolved and nVidia issues tend to affect a more specific group of customers and have better support in regards to fixing them - its a gross generalisation but backed up with numerous articles, forums threads, etc. over the years.
You absolutely can't say "they both have issues therefore the customer experience will be the same".
I agree that the whole "AMD has bad drivers" thing has been exaggerated by word of mouth, people repeating it etc. over the years but you can't take away the fact that AMD has a worse track record for what they actually do in regard to supporting their drivers and sorting ongoing issues than nVidia has. This may turn around with the never settle program but its way too early days to make a call on it.
You absolutely can't say "they both have issues therefore the customer experience will be the same".
I agree that the whole "AMD has bad drivers" thing has been exaggerated by word of mouth, people repeating it etc. over the years but you can't take away the fact that AMD has a worse track record for what they actually do in regard to supporting their drivers and sorting ongoing issues than nVidia has. This may turn around with the never settle program but its way too early days to make a call on it.