Article on XFire and SLI

[Deleted]

I know quite a few people promote or even use themselves a XFire or SLI setup for their PC. And while it can be a viable upgrade solution in some specific cases, the micro-stuttering really limits it.

I thought it might be an interesting read for those considering a Dual GPU setup.

Closing Thoughts

Frankly, there haven't been any revolutionary developments in the fields of frame rate consistency and micro-stuttering, even though we have seen improvements from Nvidia's drivers. At this point, neither competitors can claim to deliver a 100% stutter-free gaming experience with two GPUs working cooperatively.

Bearing in mind that vendors purposely try to price two mid-range cards similarly to a faster single-GPU board wherever possible (generally, when the competitive landscape allows for it), we’d have to pick the single-GPU card every time. The three-way setup based on a trio of mid-range cards is the pièce de résistance. But AMD and Nvidia also know this, and purposely handicap their less-expensive boards with just one bridge, limiting configurations to two boards. The way around this, PowerColor's Radeon HD 6870 X2 bears its own significant price premium. It's also not a quiet board, and it requires a bit of faith on your part to trust that CrossFire profiles will continue to incorporate support.

We learned one other thing from our experimentation: the faster the linked cards are, the less you see side effects from teaming them up. This precludes using two low-end cards. CrossFire and SLI only make sense from the mid-range and higher, with a slight advantage for SLI. That makes both technologies a lot less interesting for upgraders and bargain hunters. Again, given comparable pricing, we'll take the single-GPU card any day. And even then, not having to worry about micro-stuttering would compel us to pay a little more.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...e,2995-15.html

Also, no one here needs to hear you bashing THW for whatever arbitrary reason you happen to pull out of your arse. This is purely fyi.

[Asmekiel]

the faster the linked cards are, the less you see side effects from teaming them up.

Is this because the cards team up better, or is this because lower cards produce less FPS? Making it not just micro stutter, but more or less low fps stuttering.
Could be that I'm just making wrong assumptions here.

[ispano]

It's because Micro Stutter is caused when cards use AFR. Say with two cards, First does all odd frames, second does even. So it has to time the frames properly, and if the cards can pull over 60FPS easily, then you don't really notice it. but if they can't you get slight a mistiming here and there which is micro stutter. Now for the other modes where they render half a frame instead of every other, supposedly there is little to no stutter, but these modes may not work as well with all games and whatnot.

[Wries]

There is no fuffies such as microstuttering going on on my SLI system unless they are at practically full load for whatever reason. And my eyes are very picky as I'm damaged from previous work as a QC for TV shows (noticing anything wrong in video playback of transmission masters). If someone else is getting lots of MS it might be due to a different setup, bad settings, slow CPU, crappy PCIe implementation, whatever, I don't have it over here (unless full load).

For me going SLI was an upgrade path as I wasn't getting the performance I wanted to from a single 460. I don't regret it. As a tech-enthusiast I find it awesome that two cards can work together in such harmony as they do. Rendering every other frame of the same game, amazingly cool!

SLI compability is more of a concern for me. Sometimes you need to tinker in a game-profile yourself and sometimes you simply need to wait until Nvidia releases a profile, which is kinda sad. But with the new drivers game profiles are now apparently auto-updated, which is cool. Will see how that turns out, noticed NFS:HP got its settings adjusted (not that the game needs SLI, lol).

In a way I agree with Tom's. If buying a GPU solution going from scratch, I'd probably get a 570 rather than two 460's, just for the compability reason's sake. But if anyone wants to try out SLI, I'm not the one who'll say it's a bad idea.

[Ant Man]

I'm not surprised, specially not about Nvidia and AMD screwing it so you can't tri link mid range cards