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ethomaz on 19 April 2013
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disolitude said:

You're so wrong... So something is holding back my single GPU while dual GPUs are firing on all cylinders? I don't think so.

And I agree that single powerful GPU is better than 2 low end GPUs with similar power. But same money rarely gets you 1 GPU that is as powerful as 2 low end ones. GTX 660 in SLI destroys a single GTX 680 and costs less.

Here are some scaling charts with higher resolutions since you seem to like those. AMD was getting 192% performance in crossfire 2 years ago with their high end cards.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-sli-3-way-scaling,2865-10.html


This test just proved my point... five games selection... I can choose five to invert the results.

Crossfire and SLI are all driver dependent and have a lot of issues... some games scales great, other nothing and other in middle... but if you can make the SLI/Crossfire scale near or over 100% then there are something wrong with your single tests... the single-gpu is not using it power... the scale will be always below 100% and AMD/nVidia make drivers optimizations to try to reach more close to 100% possible.

SLI/Crossfire is driver dependent and there are one limitation for the scale... the hardware is only 100% more powerful... so AMD/nVidia do optimizations for specifics games to try to reach more close possible to 100% but that is impossible.

I can believe in close to 90% scaling when the drivers are optimized like a hell for a specific game (there are no optimization for all games in driver level, just for specific games) but if you have a Crossfire/SLI scaling close or over 100% then you have either issues with your single-gpu bench or the quality settings are different (a lot of settings didn't work in Crossfire/SLI mode and I already saw SLI tricks that downgrade the image quality to get better results in performance... that didn't happen with single-gpu).

That was my point about Crossfire / SLI... the only cons is the price/cost of two mid GPU is better than one single high GPU... for everything else (power, consume, noise, etc) the single GPU destroy the Crossfire/SLI... in fact it is better to make a single-gpu with twice the units then make the Crossfire/SLI in a technical term.