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what's the difference between sli and crossfire and the benefits ?

Soldato
Joined
29 Dec 2012
Posts
4,186
Hi I know this maybe a silly question to some,
I wanted to know the what's the difference between sli and crossfire and the benefits ?

I know nvidia sli only works with 2 of the same cards and the benefit is about 20%

could someone give me some more information
 
SLI scaling will be hugely different depending on what your doing both in terms of games and hardware configurations.

On my 470s I had somewhere in the region of +70% performance averaged over the games (which was most of them) that worked with multi GPU.

To be fair my perspective on crossfire is probably a little skewed by the fact most of my experience of it is being called for help when there is a problem but I'm often struck by how it seems to be a generation or 2 behind SLI. Often get a slight feeling of dejavu.
 
I believe with Nvidia you need 2 of the same GPUs/graphics cards where as with Crossfire they have to be i nthe same 'family', so a 7970 can crossfire with a 7950, but not a 7870.

I think generally, depending on the game, both give pretty good scaling these days. It won't be double the performance but mostly I'd expect it to be significantly better than 20%.

Not too much difference between them really. Crossfire will run with cards in a 4x slot where as SLI needs 8x, so some motherboards (such as mine) will support 4-way Crossfire but only 2-way SLI.

The other thing I've noticed is that with SLI you can generally use display connectors from either card where as with Crossfire it always has to be the 'main' card. Probably mostly a consideration for multiple monitors depending on display connection options available.
 
Tbh having gone down the sli crossfire and single gpu route i have to say the most stable and generally the most powerful (because it can take months for a new game to have a decent sli or crossfire profile) is just one single and powerful gpu so for instance currently that would be either the titan black or 780 ti if going nvidia or the 290x (you could also go down the 295 x 2 but dual gpu card's can have there own weird issues and are very vunerable to heat) if going ati.


Yes you could buy two 780's for the cost of one titan black and you would get better fps in some games and worse in other's (especiially in games like wow were they have not bothered doing any tweaks to gpu performance in forever and just constantly blame "user's" pc's) but your pc would be hotter and more electricity would be used and a good portion of games could have lovely crashing error's were you need to run the game in solo gpu mode and thus compelty negating any advantage you had with two gpu's.
 
Thanks, forgetting price and card is there any real difference in the 2, other then the software gimmicks ?
 
SLI scaling will be hugely different depending on what your doing both in terms of games and hardware configurations.

On my 470s I had somewhere in the region of +70% performance averaged over the games (which was most of them) that worked with multi GPU.

To be fair my perspective on crossfire is probably a little skewed by the fact most of my experience of it is being called for help when there is a problem but I'm often struck by how it seems to be a generation or 2 behind SLI. Often get a slight feeling of dejavu.

You keep saying 2 generations behind without explaining why at all and having issues does not count as generalizing the tech as 2 generations behind when that can totally contrast between users for SLI and CF and what gen of cards are being used, its about features and versatility and SLI is more limited in that regard.
 
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Seems to be making random 100x asked/answered before multiple threads per day for pure sake of it or possibly to get post count up for MM.

It is good to help others but Search does work so does Google and not to need spoon fed is also good.
 
if it came down to price does it matter if its amd or nvidia ?
do any of the little tweaks justify the cost, example 280x - gtx 770
 
IMO crossfire if anything is massively ahead. It can run on pcie x4 slots so no bs with certification hacks. Runs in families of Gpu's and doesn't need a crossfire bridge.
 
I just saw sli and 20% and assumed trolltoll.

Sli profiles are normally released well before the games actual released. Can't speak to crossfire as I've not used ati properly since the 9700 pro.
 
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