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Went from AMD to Nvidia

Nvidia 'inherited' SLI from 3DFX in 1999. Could have been 2000 actually, it's all a bit murky now...

Any way, they've been playing with it ever since. The Voodoo 5500 was one of the first cards to have SLI all on one card. IIRC one of them (the unreleased 6000 series AGP card) actually had four.

That was how 3DFX were trying to solve the issue.. Lots more slower GPU cores.

The issue then, and now, is software support. It's very hard to get.. See, not many games are coded with any more than one GPU in mind. It takes time, and it costs money. And for something that AMD have never truly stood behind what's the point?!?

90% of the games people play with more than one GPU were simply not coded to see more than one GPU. As thus, the drivers are what matter and support from the people who write them.

That's why when you step over two GPUs the gains become minimal. If the games were actually coded to see four GPUs? great ! they would then scale appropriately.

But they're not.

A couple of years back at Christmas Custom PC magazine did this article. It was basically a rip off of the BBC show "Room 101" where celebs talk about their pet hates and then put the worst of them into a room and seal it shut.

This article was all of the things that weren't really very good. Physx, SLI, RAID 0, 3Dvision etc.

Any way, in their SLI rant they had actually interviewed the guys behind Bioshock. They asked them if they support multiple GPUs and they basically said that there was no point. People running more than one GPU were such a small minority that the money the support would take was not worth spending. They referred to the games as units, and basically they said that 3 and 4 GPU versions of a game just would not sell enough units to make it viable.

PC game creators do not sit there and lovingly think of silly billies who spend £2000 on GPUs when coding their game. This is a business, and each game is a business model. As such, you want as much out with as little in as possible.

All very sad, but all very true.

At least Nvidia take SLI seriously and don't go around ripping people off for six years telling people to buy more than one GPU that they can't be arsed supporting.

Yes, I'm still glaring at you, AMD......
 
shankly1985 said:
Tbh these games should work out the box they been out how long now? Fc3 was a complete mess for everyone nvidia and amd on release, ubisoft even blamed the drivers. Not sure how it plays now might after re-download it and try.

Alice is a nvidia game so can see why 7970's in crossfire would run crap, skyrim not played so again can't comment on that.

Anyone still have fc3 installed on AMD? How it run now before I download?
Click to expand...

Yes I have it, I reinstalled it about 4 Months ago, it ran like poo on the Tahiti and is butter smooth on the Hawaii as long as you keep the FPS above 40.

No idea if its the GPU or updates.
 
To test settings quickly make fast movements/turns, these were the things that made 100fps feel like 20.

Driving higher frame rates was never an issue, it was how they felt.
 
ALXAndy said:
That was how 3DFX were trying to solve the issue.. Lots more slower GPU cores.
Click to expand...

It wasn't actually, the voodoo 3 4 and 5 lines were essentially stopgap cards because the higher up's at 3dfx kept taking engineers off the rampage project to get more boards out in the interim. The chip in the voodoo 5 wasn't too different from the one in the voodoo 3, just more clock speed (143 to 166mhz iirc) and some new features hence why they had to go to dual gpu boards to compete with new chip designs. From what I can remember they were also developing a separate chip for t&l called "sage" or something along those lines as the rampage chip was too far along to have a hardware t&l engine incorporated. The multi chip approach was meant to be dropped after the rampage project was done so they could incorporate t&l into the new core.

Was essentially management decisions that killed 3dfx, instead of getting their real next gen gpu's out the management kept creating delays and ultimately it killed them off.
 
metalmackey said:
I am not a fanboy of either and this just my experience on my setup. I had 2 7970s and they were great but I had stuttering issues in some games like Skyrim and Alice Madness Returns and others. I had sound issues in Windows where it kept cutting out. Radeon Pro reduced stuttering but not completely. Upgraded to 780ti SLI and now theres no stutter in any of my games, evem Far Cry 3 :O and sound works properly:) Games just seem to work "out of the box" better now with no fiddling about with other apps. The last Nvidia cards I had were 8800Ultras in SLI, have had AMD after till now and have been happy. I gotta say though, I'm impressed with the Nvidia drivers.
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Enjoy.

I regularly flit about between them. I have no brand loyalty unlike most here. In my view if you buy a nVidia card you're often paying a bit more than the equivalent AMD card but with nVidia things do tend to work better out the box. Not all the time is there issues with the AMD side and not on the nVidia side but on the balance of probabilities...

That said, the mass majority of issues are minor and can be worked around if you know what you're doing. If you're happy to pay less and POTENTIALLY (not always) get issues then you can be very happy with the AMD card. You're quids in if you get no problems with the AMD card. I like my current card and the only real complaints I have with it so far are random crashes in Battlefield (no other game) and stuttering in Diablo 3 which only occurs in full screen mode.
 
Its always swings and roundabouts when it comes to stuttering on multi GPU setups. The 600 series where very well known for microstutter in SLI, yet the 700 series are pretty much perfect in most titles. Its just the same with AMD though, but after their work on crossfire to minimise it, its far less of an issue and a similar experience to SLI now too, especially on the newest cards.
 
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