Remember though if Xfire doesnt scale well or glitches in the game which does happen, your sorta screwed. It may sometime yield better peformance but it doesnt have the reliability of the single powerful card.
Remember though if Xfire doesnt scale well or glitches in the game which does happen, your sorta screwed. It may sometime yield better peformance but it doesnt have the reliability of the single powerful card.V4LENT1NE
I got the GTX 580 over the crossfire because when I upgrade to SLI 580's I'll have one hell of a machine. I went with the single one to further future proof my machine a little and also I wanted the reliability of a single GPU right now.
[QUOTE="V4LENT1NE"]Remember though if Xfire doesnt scale well or glitches in the game which does happen, your sorta screwed. It may sometime yield better peformance but it doesnt have the reliability of the single powerful card.Alienware_fan
It does 98% of the time for me though. Well thats good for you but for me personally and my experience with the 4 series in Xfire I was extremely dissapointed. I know however that the newer cards scale better but thats not to say I still didnt have the best of times with Xfire, I would pick a single GPU over 2 weaker ones in Xfire anyday.
[QUOTE="V4LENT1NE"]Remember though if Xfire doesnt scale well or glitches in the game which does happen, your sorta screwed. It may sometime yield better peformance but it doesnt have the reliability of the single powerful card.V4LENT1NE
It does 98% of the time for me though. Well thats good for you but for me personally and my experience with the 4 series in Xfire I was extremely dissapointed. I know however that the newer cards scale better but thats not to say I still didnt have the best of times with Xfire, I would pick a single GPU over 2 weaker ones in Xfire anyday.
problem with going single card is the performance per dollar is much lower once you go past a certain point. For example right now its undeniable the 580 gtx is the strongest single card out there. Lets say the 580 gtx is 100% performance, then the 6970 is 91% performance of the 580gtx but costs $200 less than a 580 gtx. A 570 gtx is around 91% as well and you get it for $200 less. Then there is the 6950 2gb which is like 83% performance but costs $250 less. So technically you can buy 2X 6950 2gb radeon cards for the same price as a 580 gtx but get 166% percent max possibleperformance compared to the 580 gtx. I don't know about you but 166% >> 100% I realize there are some games that don't have perfect scaling but still chances are the crossfire setup will still give better performance than the 580gtx.
If you are wanting to upgrade your 5870 Crossfire setup I would suggest waiting for AMD's 7000 series or Nvidia's Keplar to come out. You aren't going to gain very much performance with a 6870 Crossfire.
the 6870 crossfire won't be much better, i would go for the gtx 580, if the price is the about the same, a single card solution is always better. Two hd 6950 in crossfire have noticable performance gain over the gtx 580 and that's worth the trouble, two hd 6870's not.
[QUOTE="V4LENT1NE"]Remember though if Xfire doesnt scale well or glitches in the game which does happen, your sorta screwed. It may sometime yield better peformance but it doesnt have the reliability of the single powerful card.Alienware_fan
It does 98% of the time for me though. Yeah me too. It pretty much always works. For reference My xfire 5830's get a 3dMark11 GPU score of over 6900. This beats a single 580 so 6870 would be a little better.
If I was going for a dual card setup here's what I would do.
Go for a card that can max out 99% of the games at my resolution without a second card. Now what I'll do is disable SLI/CF for most games and only enable it for games which give unsatisfactory performance. This way I'll be able to avoid the scaling problems, bugs and glitches of SLI/CF and still get the sheer performance that games like metro 2033, crysis and witcher 2 need, I certainly wouldnt mind a few bugs in those games as the performance boost would be worth it.
However I would NEVER get 2 cards just for longevity, the older your SLI/CF setup gets the worse it's support gets in the drivers. Not to mention when you would really need to have 2 cards for most of your games, budget single cards would be beating your setup and you might as well have saved the money you spent on the second card. SLI/CF is the way to go if you want to max EVERY game COMPLETELY.
[QUOTE="V4LENT1NE"][QUOTE="Alienware_fan"]It does 98% of the time for me though.
blaznwiipspman1
Well thats good for you but for me personally and my experience with the 4 series in Xfire I was extremely dissapointed. I know however that the newer cards scale better but thats not to say I still didnt have the best of times with Xfire, I would pick a single GPU over 2 weaker ones in Xfire anyday.
problem with going single card is the performance per dollar is much lower once you go past a certain point. For example right now its undeniable the 580 gtx is the strongest single card out there. Lets say the 580 gtx is 100% performance, then the 6970 is 91% performance of the 580gtx but costs $200 less than a 580 gtx. A 570 gtx is around 91% as well and you get it for $200 less. Then there is the 6950 2gb which is like 83% performance but costs $250 less. So technically you can buy 2X 6950 2gb radeon cards for the same price as a 580 gtx but get 166% percent max possibleperformance compared to the 580 gtx. I don't know about you but 166% >> 100% I realize there are some games that don't have perfect scaling but still chances are the crossfire setup will still give better performance than the 580gtx.
Crossfire doesn't work like that. Having 2x a 6950 for example will not give you the performance of TWO 6950 cards, its just a better performance than one card, but it's not double and it's not even close to double.
[QUOTE="V4LENT1NE"] Well thats good for you but for me personally and my experience with the 4 series in Xfire I was extremely dissapointed. I know however that the newer cards scale better but thats not to say I still didnt have the best of times with Xfire, I would pick a single GPU over 2 weaker ones in Xfire anyday.RaseshX
problem with going single card is the performance per dollar is much lower once you go past a certain point. For example right now its undeniable the 580 gtx is the strongest single card out there. Lets say the 580 gtx is 100% performance, then the 6970 is 91% performance of the 580gtx but costs $200 less than a 580 gtx. A 570 gtx is around 91% as well and you get it for $200 less. Then there is the 6950 2gb which is like 83% performance but costs $250 less. So technically you can buy 2X 6950 2gb radeon cards for the same price as a 580 gtx but get 166% percent max possibleperformance compared to the 580 gtx. I don't know about you but 166% >> 100% I realize there are some games that don't have perfect scaling but still chances are the crossfire setup will still give better performance than the 580gtx.
Crossfire doesn't work like that. Having 2x a 6950 for example will not give you the performance of TWO 6950 cards, its just a better performance than one card, but it's not double and it's not even close to double. Actually scaling with the 6000 series has gotten a lot better in Crossfire than previous gens.
I don't doubt that, but even so - crossfire at present will never give the performance of doubles of cards.. You can tell that just from the benchmarks, which is why you don't get double the FPS on a game from one card, to that of crossfire.
I don't doubt that, but even so - crossfire at present will never give the performance of doubles of cards.. You can tell that just from the benchmarks, which is why you don't get double the FPS on a game from one card, to that of crossfire.RaseshX
There are actually some games where you do get 100% scaling with a 2nd card in Crossfire, and a very small number of games where it's better than 100%. Yes.. you literally get better performance from 2 cards in Crossfire in a (very) few games than multiplying the framerate of a single card by 2. As it stands, there are a ton of games where you can get 80%+ performance gains by having a 2nd HD6000 series card in a Crossfire configuration.
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