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Loading ...SLI/Crossfire - the next upgrade?
combatus
I blogged about Nvidia and ATI’s relentless push for dual graphics setups a while ago [clicky] and spoke about the rediculous situation with high end boards - every single high end board out there has dual PCI-E graphics slots but hardly anyone uses them so why can’t we ditch one and get extra functionality?
This has also been mentioned several times in CPC by the well informed Ben Hardwidge who agrees with this to. So with 3-way SLI upon us and dual GPU cards due out in the next couple of months, with little news on faster single core variants, will everyone have to opt for some kind of dual GPU setup? Those of us who save up and get the best single card hoping it will last for a couple of years of high end gaming may have no choice but to opt for something that resembles a 7950GX2.
Well if this is what it will take to run Crysis at playable frame rates at 1680×1050 then so be it I hear you cry!. Hold your horses is all I can say - the 7950GX2 may well be the fastest DX9 card ever made, but they have been fraught with problems and many owners simply weren’t able to get the most out of the card due to flakey drivers and the card wouldn’t work at all with Vista to start with. There have been several people on the CPC forums asking why their GX2 is no faster than a mid range card in games even though SLI is enabled and they’ve checked everything. Its the same reason two cards don’t always scale well in some games - infact very few games scale well with SLI, at least not enough to warrant the extra money.
So is this the only option? The only way to boost framerates for the forseeable future is to do the unthinkable and get an SLi or Crossfire setup? It certainly looks this way. One would hope that both companies are hard at work making bloody sure these cards don’t suffer from the same issues as their predecessors. We’ll have to wait and see if this turns out to be the case. In the mean time I really do hope that Intel enters the market and shakes things up a bit. They say three’s a crowd, well maybe ATI or at least the graphics department at AMD, might go bust. Who knows. I just hope that those of us who have been saving get something worthy of our hard earned cash this spring.
Hm well i think your making a small mistake, think if all the next gen cards come out with SLI intended then drivers will be sutibly polished by the time the 8800Gtx and Ultras end there time as usable stand alones.
Also 2 slots ? dont you get to use the pci and pci e slots that the graphics card would take up/obstruct on these mother boards.
Finaly i quite agree 3 is realy one to many with a 3 card board costing a whoping 180+ pounds and the cheapest gtx’s are 220 so thats over 800 pounds on a new set up is you could go 3 wide with the 160 pound gt then this might be a realy choice for sum. But im not spending more 2grand i would have thought that you would need a quad core to take advantage of 3 gpu’s as a duel would not be able to deliver instuctions fast enough add on DDR3 and it boggles the mind.
And im a high end kind of guy i had the x1900xt then went to the 8800 gtx both were over 300 pounds and for that money i want the top of the range.
The 7950GX2 still has issues in some games and with SLI having been around for years, one would hope that the drivers were by now “suitably polished”. The fact is this isn’t the case and SLI on it’s own doesn’t do many games any benefits at all. Yes you can see performance increases in popular games but others see virtually no increase in FPS.
Multi-core GPUs are touted as the next big thing but it’s my understanding that these dual gpu cards due out soon are simply a stop gap, similar to the 7950GX2 which was a stop gap between the 7900 series and the 8800 series. We then got back to single core cards with the 8800GTS, GTX and ultra etc. I doubt SLI is intended to be common enough in the near future for the entire Nvidia driver section to be busy working on improved SLI performance! So my point it are we going to then be landed with another 7950GX2 scenario?
I just don’t know what to do for the best. I’ll have the money for a long awaited new system in a month or two and I wont be able financially to rebuild upgrade again for a long time so I want to make the right choice.
I want a single card solution but don’t want the now older gtx or ultra.
I’ve read elsewhere that Nvidia’s G100 is not out till July?
I’m sort of leaning towards the 3870X2 as Crossfire scales better that SLI and I think is better supported but given the choice would prefer a single card.