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disolitude on 19 April 2013
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ethomaz said:
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.

No this test didn't prove any of your points but actually proved that if you cherry pick games you can find 1 in 5 that doesn't scale well that brings down the average.

Drivers optimization is necessary yes, but most game engines are properly supported in 2013 and when a game for PC comes out using a new engine, it usually is designed with crossfire and SLI scaling in mind. Name me a high profile PC game that came out in the last 12 months that doesn't scale well. No console ports...

As far as heat, power and all that...sure. I'm not here to argue that SLI/crossfire is better on power and heat, just that it gets up to 100% scalling and 90% on most PC games. 

Also, regarding heat, 2 MSI Twin Frozr 7970s produce much less heat than a single reference 7970 and a power difference comes down to around 20 dollars per year if it runs 24/7. So yeah... Those are not major problems to me in order to get up to 100% boost in performance.