Crossfire/SLI

[Uncensored2008]

To start with, my rig is;

XCLIO 2000 Black & Titanium Case
KingWin Gold Certified 80+ 1000 Watt PS
ASUS P8P67 Pro Motherboard
Intel Core I7 2600K @ 4.6 gHz
Corsair CWCH70 Hydro Series H70 CPU Liquid Cooler
CORSAIR Vengence 8GB
2 X Diamond Radeon 5870's In Crossfire
OCZ RevoDrive 80 GB PCIE SSD (540 MBps Read)
1TB WD Black Edition SATA 3 + 500 GB WD enhanced 32mb Cache SATA 2
Panasonic DVD
Windows 7 - 64 bit

So I run a Crossfire setup. When Crossfire is supported, it really improves frame rates. I assume that the same is true of SLI on the Nvidia.

In the last few years, virtually all games are ports from consoles. consoles are running 5 year old technology with DX9 level graphics, and SURE don't support Crossfire. So about 80% of the games I get not only don't benefit from Crossfire, but actually have problems unless I disable it.

So why would anyone bother to buy a second card? Actually, given that the Xbox 360 is equivalent to a GeForce 8800, why would anyone bother to buy a high end video card at all?

Sure, Creative Assembly still makes high end games, but they are pretty much alone and may dumb things down for consoles in the next generation, so why not just run onboard I3 graphics? Modern Warfare 7's DX9 visuals won't look any different, nor will Battlefield 12's.

/rant

 

[General_XVI]

well 2 probs with that
A) are you talking about the game called crossfire
B) tell me what you mean by crossfire?

i build computer but idk wat u talking about.. refresh my memory

nice i7

 

[General_XVI]

oh nevermind.. ic now

the reason the crossfire is implimented is because in 2014 all games willl switch to hi res which decreases pixel size for sharper image...
the resaon you must disable it is because the games you speek of use larger pixels....
ex: modern warfare 2 no crossfire is non sharp edges... kind of blurry edges....
with crossfire... sharp rrealistic look...
the reason everything is going to need crossfire is to increase the games enjoyability and overall awww

 

[General_XVI]

also it really actually decreases fram rates btw

 

[Uncensored2008]

well 2 probs with that
A) are you talking about the game called crossfire
B) tell me what you mean by crossfire?

i build computer but idk wat u talking about.. refresh my memory

nice i7

Hi Crossfire X is a method of connecting two Radeon cards together to improve the horsepower for rendering. This puts two or more GPU's to work processing graphics.

AMD CrossFireX

 

[Uncensored2008]

also it really actually decreases fram rates btw

No, not even close. On high end DX11 titles such as Dirt2 or Shogun 2 (or post patch Crysis 2) Crossfire significantly improves frame rates when AA and AF are enabled with all details maxed out. The reason that most Unreal Engine 3 games flicker is that the frame buffer doesn't synchronize, a trick that Epic used to increase frame rates. It works, but when two buffers are feeding it, then they get out of sync and start flickering.

 

[nitroz]

To be honest, you have to have a video card with 1.5GB or more of GDDR5 memory to play games good now.

I had a 1GB DDR3 video card and it was worse than the stock processor graphics. Then I burnt my hand when taking it out to take it back. (Apparently letting it cool for a few mins wasn't long enough)

VisionTek - ATI Radeon HD 5450 1GB DDR3 PCI Express Graphics Card - 900358
that was what I was using.