CF/SLI GPU worth the potentional problems? Trying to justify it.

[Friendlychap]

I am trying to justify to myself whether or not I should get a 2nd 7970, or if in the future I go back to Nvidia, that I buy dual gpus from their lineup. Or maybe buy the 7990 when it comes out.

But the main problem is obviously the potential issues that plague SLI/CF setups.

What I am afraid of is....having a CF/SLI setup....and when a new game comes out - only 1 gpu is being used because the game doesn't initially support SLI/CF...and then when the developers eventually update the game to support it...it's plagued with crashes/errors/microstutter. Which would mean I've got a $400-600 piece of useless sitting there...which is a very big turn off.

A friend of mine has SLI 570 and SLI 580 setups, he has issues every now and then, but when he doesn't have issues and the game fully supports SLI his gameplay is just amazing....but there are times where he is sitting there only using the single card. In some games he gets errors/texture bugs with SLi so he ends up switching SLI mode off and using a single GPU.

My other question is...are dual-GPUs like the 590/690/6990 and the upcoming 7990 plagued with the same issues or do they run like normal single cards do ?

[Demoness]

I am trying to justify to myself whether or not I should get a 2nd 7970, or if in the future I go back to Nvidia, that I buy dual gpus from their lineup. Or maybe buy the 7990 when it comes out.

But the main problem is obviously the potential issues that plague SLI/CF setups.

What I am afraid of is....having a CF/SLI setup....and when a new game comes out - only 1 gpu is being used because the game doesn't initially support SLI/CF...and then when the developers eventually update the game to support it...it's plagued with crashes/errors/microstutter. Which would mean I've got a $400-600 piece of useless sitting there...which is a very big turn off.

A friend of mine has SLI 570 and SLI 580 setups, he has issues every now and then, but when he doesn't have issues and the game fully supports SLI his gameplay is just amazing....but there are times where he is sitting there only using the single card. In some games he gets errors/texture bugs with SLi so he ends up switching SLI mode off and using a single GPU.

My other question is...are dual-GPUs like the 590/690/6990 and the upcoming 7990 plagued with the same issues or do they run like normal single cards do ?

I cannot speak for the dual GPU cards, but I had SLI 570s before I bought a 680. I plan on buying a second 680 in the coming months as well. I never had any problems with any games related to SLI. Pretty much all modern games benefit from the second card by at least 80% or so. If you only plan on playing WoW or D3, don't do it because you will not notice any difference. BF3 though, is like butter compared to a single card.

[Friendlychap]

I cannot speak for the dual GPU cards, but I had SLI 570s before I bought a 680. I plan on buying a second 680 in the coming months as well. I never had any problems with any games related to SLI. Pretty much all modern games benefit from the second card by at least 80% or so. If you only plan on playing WoW or D3, don't do it because you will not notice any difference. BF3 though, is like butter compared to a single card.

I noticed you said about BF3 and SLI 570s.

My friend who has SLI 570s 1.2gb has problems with BF3 on ultra settings, he runs out of VRAM, he has to turn options down to stop it. His SLI 580s are the 3GB version and don't have the issue.

[Wries]

Crossfire doesn't support making your own profiles or disabling it for one particular game should it turn out to be bad or not needed, although recent updates in ccc suggests it may come in the future. It will generally not work with games that run in a windowed mode. With the risk of getting bad weather I will just say that both tomshardware and sweclockers have stated that crossfire suffers from notably more microstutter issues than SLI.

I've personally had very few issues with SLI but the issue of a new game not supporting it is very real. Now I've almost always been able to manually fix this by tinkering custom profiles through Nvidia Inspector but if the game in question is running a completely new engine it will probably not work.

Microstuttering may be an issue if you don't run with vsync. It may become an issue regardless, but general impression is that it is more of an issue for people who don't use that particular feature.

[Deleted]

I have used SLI back when the 7600gt's where around right up until today and not once have i had a problem with it.

[Evildeffy]

Crossfire doesn't support making your own profiles or disabling it for one particular game should it turn out to be bad or not needed, although recent updates in ccc suggests it may come in the future. It will generally not work with games that run in a windowed mode. With the risk of getting bad weather I will just say that both tomshardware and sweclockers have stated that crossfire suffers from notably more microstutter issues than SLI.

Actually profile creation has been added since Catalyst 12, overdue i know, but that's still 5 months ago they released it.

Also Microstuttering is present but not in the high end cards (well they are, just not truly noticable in general), barring the 79X0 series, they seem to have some driver issues going for that series which makes it noticable, AMD be slacking on the HD79X0 series drivers.

In any case, either way, 7970 or 680 * 2 or 690 will bring pain to w/e you're playing, so if you want the cheapest and still just as effective a route, get a 7970, if no holds barred, get either 2 * 680 or 1 * 690, but that's alot of ka-ching regardless, if you do decide to go for 1 of the latter 2 option then gimme your 7970 for free

[Deleted]

I can't recommend SLI/Crossfire. As you said, first month or so a new game doesn't properly utilize the second gpu. More incompatibilities. Any driver related graphical issues in games are double of what with single gpu. More heat, noise and power consumption.

I haven't noticed any stutter, but I'm not very sensitive for that kind of stuff.

Just for example, I can't OC my GPUs. If I do that, the 2d clocks for primary adapter gets messed up and end up being too low, which causes screen corruption with dual monitors. Simple driver issue, but it hasn't been fixed in the ~2 years I've had this setup. And the scaling is not always 90%. Could be as low as 40%, depending on many factors.

[Deleted]

I can't recommend SLI/Crossfire. As you said, first month or so a new game doesn't properly utilize the second gpu

Perhaps this is different between CF/SLI but only times I have problem with my SLI is with indie games(which doesnt really need two gpus anyway) and beta games. And most high profiled betas do get sli update from nvidia. (2x gtx 480)

[Deleted]

Perhaps this is different between CF/SLI but only times I have problem with my SLI is with indie games(which doesnt really need two gpus anyway) and beta games. And most high profiled betas do get sli update from nvidia. (2x gtx 480)

Not that smooth with Crossfire; when Skyrim came, first three or four hotfixes caused corrupted graphics (green rectangular textures), without hotfixes it used about one and a tenth gpu. Same for BF3, first performance hotfixes caused crashing and graphical corruption.