[XBitLabs] HD7850 Crossfire versus HD7950/HD7970/GTX680

[Termie]

XBitLabs has just posted a review of a number of HIS Radeons, including the HD7850, HD7950, and HD7950. But the most interesting aspect of the article is the test of HD7850 Crossfire, which is rarely touched upon in professional reviews.

Link: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/his-iceq-x2-7970-7950-7850.html

The article shows both the promise and the peril of mid-range Crossfire:

In any game where it scales well (i.e., most of the games above), it will easily beat the HD7970, for about the same total cost. On the other hand, sometimes Crossfire flat out doesn't work - this is one of the "headaches" associated with going Crossfire, particularly if it's in a game you play regularly. The best indication of whether it will scale near 100%, based on the evidence above, is if it's in AMD's Gaming Evolved program. Those games all scale perfectly.

Just thought this might be interesting to some folks around here...in the previous generation, lots of people (myself included) went with HD5850/6870 crossfire due to the bang for the buck. I haven't seen many people toying around with that lately using the HD7850/HD7870.

 

[RussianSensation]

I think CF only makes sense with HD7950 or faster. This way with an 1100mhz OC+, you end up within 95% of the performance of a GTX680/HD7970GE and when CF scales, you get a much faster setup. Otherwise I wouldn't recommend going CF with anything less than a 7950. We know that HD7950 can also surpass HD7970GE in performance with overclocking, which would mean it would still provide reasonable performance even in cases where CF doesn't work.

I wish I had waited for HD7950s to drop to $280. The performance even at 950mhz is not that far behind $430-450 single GPU flagship cards like HD7970GE/GTX680.

 

[DiogoDX]

I know that the BL2 runs better on nvidia cards like AMD GE runs better on AMD cards but found it odd the difference in performance.

So I went in the description of the test and saw that they are testing the game with physx on. And the results are in average performance table.

Very strange a large site with this kind of amateurism.

Borderlands 2 (DirectX 11) – version 1.3.1, built-in benchmark with maximum image quality settings and maximum PhysX level, FXAA enabled.