CrossFireX Arrives: First Look at 3 and 4 GPUs in 2 Card Setups
by Derek Wilson on March 7, 2008 12:05 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Performance
Version: 1.4
Settings: All Highest Quality
For this benchmark, we use FRAPS to measure average frame rate during the opening cut-scene of the game. We start FRAPS as soon as the screen clears in the helicopter and we stop it right as the captain grabs his head gear. As we saw in the preview, this game does scale beyond two GPUs, and our tests here show some very interesting results.
Unlike in Oblivion, Call of Duty 4 scales well with three or four GPUs no matter what resolution we are running. We did enable the option to support dual graphics cards, and it is clear that when developers put some effort into explicitly supporting multi-GPU configurations good results can be achieved. This is also interesting in light of the fact that this game is a little more flat when it comes to resolution scaling than other titles.
| Call of Duty 4 Performance | ||||
| 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 | 1920x1200 | 2560x1600 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 127.7 | 116 | 104.3 | 78.8 |
| NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra SLI | 145.8 | 134.1 | 127.4 | 102.8 |
| NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra | 78.3 | 75.7 | 70 | 57.5 |
| NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT | 66.5 | 59.4 | 55 | 40.8 |
| AMD Radeon HD 3870x2 (x 2) | 89.6 | 86.3 | 82.6 | 74.8 |
| AMD Radeon HD 3870x2 + 3870 | 78.2 | 74.8 | 72.9 | 64.5 |
| AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2 | 61.5 | 56 | 53.8 | 47.5 |
| AMD Radeon HD 3870 | 46.4 | 41.3 | 38.2 | 29.6 |
In spite of the fact that four GPUs scales well on AMD hardware, NVIDIA's 8800 Ultra GPUs in SLI handily outperform the quad solution, as does 9600 GT SLI up to 2560x1600. Call of Duty 4 has certainly favored NVIDIA hardware, as is shown by the fact that a single 8800 Ultra can keep up with three 3870 cards in CrossFireX, and a single 9600 GT performs on par with the 3870X2.
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kilkennycat - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
Multi-chip hybrid substrates with widely-spaced dies can help to spread out the heat rather nicely and help keep the overall yield up too, as Intel has demonstrated with the quad Core 2 processors. I fully expect hybrid substrates to become a popular interim solution to the need for masively-parallel processing GPUs -like IBMs 20-chip solution for their big number-crunchers. The hybrid/chip combo- architecture can be designed to externally emulate a single GPU. Also a very nice way of adding some extra local memory if necessary.DerekWilson - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
i agree that this is good direction to go, but even with intel we've still got dual socket boards for multicore chips ...the real answer for the end user is always get as fast a single card as possible and if you need more than one make it as few and as powerful cards as you can.
e6600 - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
no crysis benchies?Slash3 - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
Crysis is broken as a benchmark... despite all pre-release hype, the game seems to scale very badly across multiple cores and multiple GPUs. It's is kind of unfortunate, as if there's one game that could benefit from efficient scaling, it's Crysis.JarredWalton - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
I'm curious to see if version 1.2 fixes anything... it might. That just came out yesterday, so I don't think many have had a chance to look at whether or not performance changed.[Just checked]
At least for single GPUs, I see no real change in performance. I haven't had a chance to test multi-GPU, and all I have right now is SLI and CrossFire. Could be that v1.2 will help more with 3-way and 4-way configs. We'll see.
DerekWilson - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
there was no perf benefit at all from going to 3 or 4 gpus ... we saw this in our preview and when we tested the 8.3 driver. we mention that on the test page ...