I wanted to pass along some testing I recently conducted on HD7870 Crossfire. I used four different benchmark programs, as well as four different games, to illustrate the effectiveness of the HD7870 Crossfire system, compared to a single HD7870 and a single GTX670, both at reference clocks. The settings used are indicated on each graph, and the right-hand axis of each graph shows the percent scaling over the baseline, which is the single reference-clocked HD7870. All testing was done on an i7-3770k@4.4GHz. The HD7870s used were a Sapphire Dual-X and an XFX Core, both run at 1000MHz/1200MHz, while the GTX670 was an EVGA FTW downclocked to 1084MHz Boost/1500 MHz to emulate a reference 670.
A few of the benchmarks are shown below. The complete article is available at The Tech Buyer's Guru.
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Right off the bat, we see that scaling is pretty good here in the 3DMark tests. Ironically, the newer of the two, 3DMark Fire Strike, exhibits the lowest scaling we'll see in any of the tests here, despite it utilizing a great number of graphics features. For both of the graphs above, pay close attention to the Graphics Score, rather than the Score, which is significantly affected by the CPU being used for all tests. In Fire Strike, the HD7870 scores 5394, the GTX670 6419, and HD7870 Crossfire 8938. In 3DMark 11, the HD7870 scores 7349, the GTX670 scores 9187, and HD7870 Crossfire scores 13131. Crossfire is scaling at 65.7% in Fire Strike and 78.7% in 3DMark11. Interestingly, the GTX670 is only 18.5% faster than the HD7870 in both these tests, despite costing at least 50% more.
Now this is more like it! We see Crossfire scaling pegged at 100%, at least for the average, which is just over 60fps in both tests. Despite both benchmarks being based on Unigine technology, Heaven's minimum scales poorly, while Valley's is near-perfect. These tests favor the GTX670 over the HD7870, as the former opens up a 31% lead in both, averaging 40fps to the HD7870's 32fps. Still, it's impossible to argue that Crossfire is not extremely effective in these synthetic benchmarks at significantly outperforming a single GTX670.
A few of the benchmarks are shown below. The complete article is available at The Tech Buyer's Guru.
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Right off the bat, we see that scaling is pretty good here in the 3DMark tests. Ironically, the newer of the two, 3DMark Fire Strike, exhibits the lowest scaling we'll see in any of the tests here, despite it utilizing a great number of graphics features. For both of the graphs above, pay close attention to the Graphics Score, rather than the Score, which is significantly affected by the CPU being used for all tests. In Fire Strike, the HD7870 scores 5394, the GTX670 6419, and HD7870 Crossfire 8938. In 3DMark 11, the HD7870 scores 7349, the GTX670 scores 9187, and HD7870 Crossfire scores 13131. Crossfire is scaling at 65.7% in Fire Strike and 78.7% in 3DMark11. Interestingly, the GTX670 is only 18.5% faster than the HD7870 in both these tests, despite costing at least 50% more.
Now this is more like it! We see Crossfire scaling pegged at 100%, at least for the average, which is just over 60fps in both tests. Despite both benchmarks being based on Unigine technology, Heaven's minimum scales poorly, while Valley's is near-perfect. These tests favor the GTX670 over the HD7870, as the former opens up a 31% lead in both, averaging 40fps to the HD7870's 32fps. Still, it's impossible to argue that Crossfire is not extremely effective in these synthetic benchmarks at significantly outperforming a single GTX670.
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