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What are the problems of having MULTI GPU?
- Thread starter marc512
- Start date
I've never had any issues personally, but in general the cons are:
- More power hungry than a single card
- more heat to disapate
- the expense (though this depends what you are comparing it to).
- performance is largely down to how good the drivers are - there are sometimes niggles with certain games that take nVidia/ATI a while to sort.
As above, plus you are very much at the mercy of the game as to whether you get a representative increase in performance with Crossfire/SLI. These days it tends to be better, true, but if there are particular games you are interested in playing, it would be worth checking benchmarks to see how they themselves perform with multiple GPUs.
You will get times when not all games support it, for big titles this is resolved before or very soon after launch.
You will get games that just dont scale by the ~70% you are really looking for
You may get microstutter, you may not notice this
You will get games that just dont scale by the ~70% you are really looking for
You may get microstutter, you may not notice this
cheers 
i see the point of the reasons giving
Iv seen benchmarks of 5870s and 5850s in single and corssfire mode. some games there are only 1-2 fps difference on high resolutions. But there big cards what have massive ammount of power and you wont ever get a game what will run them at 100%.
i see the point of the reasons givingIv seen benchmarks of 5870s and 5850s in single and corssfire mode. some games there are only 1-2 fps difference on high resolutions. But there big cards what have massive ammount of power and you wont ever get a game what will run them at 100%.
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Main issues are basically:
Power - You need a good PSU
Temperature - You need to keep it all cool, most of the time stock cooling is OK but you'll see a temperature raise in the case so depends how cool it is already, high temperatures can effect max overclock.
Support, it's up to AMD/ATI to provide support in the drivers for games, crossfire isn't part of the DirectX standard and so games aren't expected to support it, that's entiely down to ATI, this means you need to get regular driver updates to get the most of your system.
Price/Performance ratio - The ratio of performance you get for your money is not always good in the low end market, sometimes it's worth justing buying 1 fast card rather than several slower ones, even if performance is the same you still get less of the other problems listed above.
Scaling - Some games scale badly over crossfire (Crysis), some games scale nearly perfectly (CoD MW), you shouldn't expect 2x performance with 2x cards, it basically never happens, think of +80% as a decent average. When you go 3 cards scaling is even worse and with 4 it's pretty much no faster.
Eyefinity - Eyefinity cannot be used with crossfire currently (outside of a single 5970 that is)
Power - You need a good PSU
Temperature - You need to keep it all cool, most of the time stock cooling is OK but you'll see a temperature raise in the case so depends how cool it is already, high temperatures can effect max overclock.
Support, it's up to AMD/ATI to provide support in the drivers for games, crossfire isn't part of the DirectX standard and so games aren't expected to support it, that's entiely down to ATI, this means you need to get regular driver updates to get the most of your system.
Price/Performance ratio - The ratio of performance you get for your money is not always good in the low end market, sometimes it's worth justing buying 1 fast card rather than several slower ones, even if performance is the same you still get less of the other problems listed above.
Scaling - Some games scale badly over crossfire (Crysis), some games scale nearly perfectly (CoD MW), you shouldn't expect 2x performance with 2x cards, it basically never happens, think of +80% as a decent average. When you go 3 cards scaling is even worse and with 4 it's pretty much no faster.
Eyefinity - Eyefinity cannot be used with crossfire currently (outside of a single 5970 that is)
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with the 58xx series really need to wait for Direct X 11 to have more games available to see the advantage, but saying that most Dirt 2 benchmarks wont show much difference because the game wasnt running in crossfire AMD have since released a hot fix for it to work
I'll also add, that as a GENERAL rule (I'm sure there are examples where this may not be true) it is not cost effective to SLI current gen cards when you do a cost/performance comparison against SLI setups and a single more powerful card.
However, this generation breaks this rule as 2 x 5770's (£250) = 5870 (£350).
