Should i crossfire my card ?

[Durvelle27]

I'm wondering if i should crossfire or not to achieve better FPS in some of my games. I play Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3, BF3, Far Cry 3,Assassins Creed III, Sleeping Dogs etc. And if so is it worth upgrading my mobo. I normally game at 1080p most game with eye candy and some without due to low FPS. My spec are in my sig

 

[BrightCandle]

Definitely no. Too many of the games listed suffer from runt frames and you are better off waiting to see what amd does to fix the bug.

 

[Fastx]

I'm wondering if i should crossfire or not to achieve better FPS in some of my games. I play Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3, BF3, Far Cry 3,Assassins Creed III, Sleeping Dogs etc. And if so is it worth upgrading my mobo. I normally game at 1080p most game with eye candy and some without due to low FPS. My spec are in my sig

IMO I will consider CF my 7950 when I decide I want or need more power and for higher in game settings. I have read some guys on (H) with tweaking settings & using RP who seem to like it and prefer it in some games on the 7000 series. Also its seems we might/should even see an improvement on CF since AMD is working on drivers to improve CF which are suppose to be released around July.

Check this post.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2311387&highlight=

 

[Eureka]

I'm wondering if i should crossfire or not to achieve better FPS in some of my games. I play Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3, BF3, Far Cry 3,Assassins Creed III, Sleeping Dogs etc. And if so is it worth upgrading my mobo. I normally game at 1080p most game with eye candy and some without due to low FPS. My spec are in my sig

Sell the 7870, buy a 7950/670/7970/680. It'll cost you less in the end than buying a second 7870 and you should be able to max everything out if you get a 7970 or a good overclocking 7950/670.

 

[wand3r3r]

I don't know but Termie has just checked out a few games and comes across positively. People are quite polarized on the crossfire fps and smoothness.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2311387

 

[nightspydk]

It's all about how the cards scale. Sorry to interfere but I expect that would go for ATI as well. You can find cards that scale excellent. Eg the Nvidia 460 where with the right monitoring software you can see the load is distributed 50/50. Yep drivers is a must tho.

Sometimes it work work off the shelf, but then it will be patched for your pleasure.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

The thing people constantly neglect to talk about when they discuss runt frames lowering your effective framerate is that crossfire may not be able to offer much increase over the perceived framerate of a single card, but it will afford you massive increases in IQ settings, and maintain somewhat higher FPS.

With an FPS cap or Vsync the stuttering issues are almost all corrected, and you get a setup capable of ultra settings, high AA settings, and higher resolutions.

 

[railven]

The thing people constantly neglect to talk about when they discuss runt frames lowering your effective framerate is that crossfire may not be able to offer much increase over the perceived framerate of a single card, but it will afford you massive increases in IQ settings, and maintain somewhat higher FPS.

With an FPS cap or Vsync the stuttering issues are almost all corrected, and you get a setup capable of ultra settings, high AA settings, and higher resolutions.

This is important to factor, runt frames or not I can vouch that CFX permits me to use high AA and IQ settings in WoW and there is a perceivable improvement.

 

[Durvelle27]

Sell the 7870, buy a 7950/670/7970/680. It'll cost you less in the end than buying a second 7870 and you should be able to max everything out if you get a 7970 or a good overclocking 7950/670.

a second HD 7870 would only cost $180

 

[bystander36]

I guess the question is: Do you regularly use v-sync or not? V-sync has shown it can fix the runt frame issue, but it induces some latency. Depending on how you game, you may or may not gain a lot of benefit from Crossfire.

If you do not, there is the FPS limiting option, which is not ideal, as it requires you to restrict FPS, but it does help.

 

[nightspydk]

Honestly man that is ridicusly. You can benefit a lot check vulgardisplay.

 

[codyray10]

No you should not. Unless you realllly want to spend $180. I run a 7870 OC myself, and see that your card is clocked slightly higher than mine. I just finished Bioshock Infinite and played through the campaign on max settings with only a few slowdowns here and there but nothing major that had any effect on gameplay. Same with BF3, Far Cry 3 and Tomb Raider...you should have no issues running them at near max settings and still maintain 40-50+ fps.

 

[Durvelle27]

I guess the question is: Do you regularly use v-sync or not? V-sync has shown it can fix the runt frame issue, but it induces some latency. Depending on how you game, you may or may not gain a lot of benefit from Crossfire.

If you do not, there is the FPS limiting option, which is not ideal, as it requires you to restrict FPS, but it does help.

some games i do but others i don't

 

[SPBHM]

you should check the PC Perspective articles,
it's clear that CF is not delivering an equivalent experience to SLI or Single GPU,
you may be able to improve with vsync and some max framerate lock, but it's not going to give you super smooth gaming out of the box, it's simply a lot more problematic at the moment, clearly there is potential to improve things, but...
I would recommend holding your decision for a few months until AMD releases their promised driver update to improve this, for now I would only recommend going for a faster card, like a 7950/7970, or something from Nvidia.

 

[Durvelle27]

you should check the PC Perspective articles,
it's clear that CF is not delivering an equivalent experience to SLI or Single GPU,
you may be able to improve with vsync and some max framerate lock, but it's not going to give you super smooth gaming out of the box, it's simply a lot more problematic at the moment, clearly there is potential to improve things, but...
I would recommend holding your decision for a few months until AMD releases their promised driver update to improve this, for now I would only recommend going for a faster card, like a 7950/7970, or something from Nvidia.

not really an nvidia guy

 

[Durvelle27]

I don't know but Termie has just checked out a few games and comes across positively. People are quite polarized on the crossfire fps and smoothness.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2311387

thx

 

[aaksheytalwar]

I would not go cf.

 

[Durvelle27]

I would not go cf.

any given reason

 

[Sleepingforest]

More heat, more power needs, potential stuttering and runt frames, issues in games where multi-card just fails, and the existence of more powerful single card options, and selling the 7870 for $150 and getting a $270 7950 will cost less than getting another 7870.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Ms, what else

 

[psolord]

I am using 7950 crossfire (as well as two other dual gpu systems) and I was always happy with their performance. I always use vsync when gaming though and set my games in such a way that I always have 60fps.

Since I am pretty new to the 7950 CFX, I have only seen stuttering in Tomb Raider, even with vsync enabled, but that went away when I enabled MSI Afterburner's framerate limiter. Played the game from start to finish and it was great. It only stuttered in very few occasions and I am thinking it was due to cpu limits.

The other game I have used crossfire so far, is Crysis 3.


To show the performance benefit of crossfire, I even made two videos of the scene in Only Human level, where Prophet rides the Vtol. I chose this scene because it's automated up to the point I recorded, so it would be the same for both recordings. Also there's a lot of camera panning, which is the worse motion for the viewer, if there's stuttering.


Here's the video of the 7950 crossfire. This is how I play and this is what I see. 60fps vsynced. Actually it's better in real life because Crysis 3 is very cpu heavy and Fraps needs a lot of cpu as well, but still it's good enough.

This is the video of the single 7950 at the same settings. I only disabled vsync for this one, otherwise I would be getting a steady 30fps, thus artificially making my point even stronger on a difference that is already huge.

What people seem to forget, is that dual gpu solutions almost double the available gpu processing pool capabilities of the system and this coupled with vsync, gives a great end result for the user. I totally get that the beauty or not of vsync on or off, lies at the eye of the beholder, but personally I never enjoyed disabled vsync. On my Nvidia SLI system it was jerky as well (crossfire is more jerky but that's beyond the point-jerky is jerky). Single gpu with no vsync is jerkly/teary for my taste as well.

Normally I would be the first to jump on a single gpu solution that offers the performance of two gpus, but this comes with an increased cost. Now if the buyer can tolerate this cost, sure go for it. For example I'd never buy a Titan @1000€ in order to get 7950 CFX performance though which I can have for 600€ (plus 100€ in games bundle), but I would buy a 7950 GHz in order to get 570 sli performance, which I did.

 

[FalseChristian]

I'm an SLI junkie so I say go get another 7870 which blows my GTX 460 1GB outta the water. CrossFire the suckers and your good until DirectX 12 comes out within the nest 10 years.

 

[Durvelle27]

leaning towards just getting another HD 7870

 

[magomago]

I have sli 460s and love it.

However,
(1) Some incompatibilities (F@H hates SLI and bogs my system down)
(2) Graphical Bugs you live with (weird geometry clamping - happens in skyrim, dota2. sc2 also experiences the problem when i play campaign)
(3) I do see the stuttering (easily most apparent in skyrim) but i've adapted to its so its no longer a major issue.

my only problem is that if i want to step up, I need a big jump. GTX670 or better LOL. ORRR SLI once more.

To be honest I don't know if I would SLI again because I'd rather have it "just work" than 'tinker tinker' or 'live-with-known-issues', buts its very tempting to SLI because you can get great performance for cheap (note the Termie link where 2xGTX660 > GTX680) if you are willing to live with bugs

 

[willomz]

Because the 7870 is a mid range card I would suggest selling it and buying a 7970 instead. Since 7870s aren't that old you should have little trouble selling it, whereas it might be harder selling 2 of them in say 3 years time.

There's just no need to go for the hassle/risk of CF.