[TomsHardware] CrossFire Scales Spectacularly

[StinkyPinky]

Never understood the point of SLI/Crossfire. At least in the mid-range cards.

Why have two weaker cards that add an extra point of failure and technical problems when you can just have one more powerful card.

 

[3DVagabond]

Never understood the point of SLI/Crossfire. At least in the mid-range cards.

Why have two weaker cards that add an extra point of failure and technical problems when you can just have one more powerful card.

It's cheaper. The only reason.

 

[deimos3428]

It's cheaper. The only reason.

It's not quite accurate to think of them as two "single points of failure". More like a disk mirror; they're also redundant.

If you only have one card and it dies, you're not seeing anything at all unless you've got onboard video. If you've got SLI/CF, you can keep on gaming, albeit at lower settings.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Never understood the point of SLI/Crossfire. At least in the mid-range cards.

Why have two weaker cards that add an extra point of failure and technical problems when you can just have one more powerful card.

Because, if you added another 5850 it would be hard to beat the performance you'd get for that money.

 

[mosox]

The old tom's died when Pabst sold out to the Media Marketing Group (I think that was name of the initial buyers).

At least they didn't sell out to PC hardware manufacturers like some other guys I know.

 

[Idontcare]

At least they didn't sell out to PC hardware manufacturers like some other guys I know.

Are you talking about the game developers? Why is cross-fire scaling (and SLI scaling) game specific/dependent? Is it for the same reasons that thread scaling performance is app dependent for CPU's?

 

[mosox]

Are you talking about the game developers? Why is cross-fire scaling (and SLI scaling) game specific/dependent? Is it for the same reasons that thread scaling performance is app dependent for CPU's?

No, I was talking about some hardware sites who use in their reviews very high settings in the gaming benchmarks for lower end cards even if the game shows up as unplayable at those settings - and this only to show that the video card manufacturer "X" is better - those high settings favor his hardware.

And who use very low resolutions and settings on high-end video cards for the gaming benchmarks in the CPU reviews only to show that the CPU manufacturers "Y" are better and there's a huge difference between their products and those of the competition in the games.

And who use cherry-picked games in their reviews (even if those games are nowhere near the list of the most demanded games) - up to 50-60% of the games featured in the reviews being developed by some game developers who work closely with the "X" video card manufacturer - the games being "tweaked" to suit the said company and behave badly for the competition.

 

[Soleron]

Anand is one the last of the original old-school independently owned review sites. There are new ones like ABT, and maybe [H] would count as new and not old-school, I don't remember them from the K6/pentium days like Anand and Tom's, but there's no school like the old-school IMO.

What do you think of Tech Report?

 

[jiffylube1024]

This is a very recent development - AMD seems to have finally solved what was holding Crossfire performance back. Compare brand new reviews (like in the Ti 550 review) what the ATI 5970 and 6xxx series in Crossfire are doing to how they performed even a few months ago (ie in the 6950/70 review) and Crossfire/dual cards have made some massive gains.

Actually, the Crossfire performance advantage seems to have come about with the release of the 6990. AMD probably worked very hard to get performance of the 6990 strong, and in doing so the gains they made trickled down to the other cards being crossfired. Very interesting indeed.