Prices, Stutter and The Test

We've added our four new test cases to the price lineup. Naturally they are not cheap.

Cost of Graphics Solution

As we mentioned in the 3-way article, our experience with stutter increased with the number of cards. Two way seems to be the smoothest of the multiGPU options, and we ran into the most problems with 4-way. Both AMD and NVIDIA showed some stuttering in Crysis, and there were issues in other games where scaling didn't happen the way we would have liked. Honestly, gamers who choose 4-way options will need to be hands on to get the best experience, disabling SLI and CrossFire when they get in the way of themselves.

Thus the price to pay for these solutions is not just higher in terms of money, but higher in terms of the effort needed to maintain a positive experience. NVIDIA gives us options to entertain ourselves by using some of our hardware for PhysX rather than SLI if SLI doesn't happen to work out as well as expected. This is definitely a plus at the very high end, as simply disabling hardware completely is dissatisfying in light of the cost.

Our test system is the same as it has been for the previous articles.

Test Setup
CPU Intel Core i7-965 3.2GHz
Motherboard ASUS Rampage II Extreme X58
Video Cards ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB CrossFire
ATI Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
ATI Radeon HD 4850
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 SLI
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 SLI
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 SLI
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ SLI
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 core 216
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+
Video Drivers Catalyst 8.12 hotfix
ForceWare 181.22
Hard Drive Intel X25-M 80GB SSD
RAM 6 x 1GB DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
PSU PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 1200W

And now on with performance.

Who Scales ... And Timing Age of Conan Analysis
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  • Hattiwatti - Thursday, June 11, 2009 - link

    How 'bout if you'd overclock the prosessor to something like 4,0 GHz so it wouldn't be such a bottleneck to the Quad-SLI and Quad-CrossfireX configurations? I have tested it myself (with i7 920 and 2 GTX295's), and it really pays off. The performance increases a lot when CPU's clock is raised from 2,66 GHz to 3,8 GHz. It definitely makes a difference (NOTE: 3,6 GHz is still a bottleneck, and maybe 3,8 GHz is too. Couldn't overclock more and test since memory couldn't go any further)
  • marraco - Thursday, March 5, 2009 - link

    The price/performance charts favours the cheapest cards, but give little useful information.

    What really shows the price/performance information, is an XY chart with price vs performance.

    With it is easy to see what is the better performer at a given price, and the cheapest option at a given performance. Also shows closely related price/perfornmance options if you can't have access to the best performer, because is not available.

    and with XY charts is easy to see the best bang for the buck, because is commonly found at the sharp bending of the lower price evolvent line.
  • SiliconDoc - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    Let's hope the reviewers here take your information to heart and put it to use.
    I suspect though the FUD and bias will win out.
  • Dazzz - Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - link

    Although your article is really intresting, I would rather see some benchmarks including the people who it might also be interesting beside 30" display owners.

    Right know I'm thinking about purchasing a TrippleHead2Go after they updated the firmware and support 3x1680x1050.

    Unfortunately even widescreengaming forum can't provide FPS benchmarks for the 5040x1050 resolution.

    I'm thinking about going multiGPU but there is no comparison nvida and ati at this resolution.

    This article could have been the platform to support surroundgaming and show if 2/4way gpu's make sense in this context.


    I'm looking for such an comparison for 2 weeks now and couldn't find anything. And I'm still stuck with my decision if a single gtx295 could deliver a playable performance (disregarding the quality settings for the time beeing) or if I have to look for other sollution like 4way or 2way GTX285.

    Any suggestions ?



  • VooDooAddict - Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - link

    I very much like the resolution switching for the tables.

    This has confirmed what I'd been leaning towards for my next build (Shuttle X58 SFF). I'll be getting one of the following Dual GPU cards to run my 1920x1200 gaming.

    GTX295
    4870 X2
    4850 X2

    (I was running two 4850s in a X38 Shuttle SFF for a while before the frequent overheating caused me to switch to a single 4870.)
  • Antman56 - Sunday, March 1, 2009 - link

    I think that these Quad 4850 framerates need to have a special label. Using 512MB Radeon 4850s in Quadfire is not a good idea for 2560x1600. 1GB 4850s would have shown the 4850s high resolution muscle way better (as it did with the 4870 1GB cards vs 4870 512MB cards). Scaling would not be so poor.

    Otherwise, nice compilation of information. :p
  • TonkaTuff - Sunday, March 1, 2009 - link

    Best graph layout Ive seen on any site so far, so much easier to pick your desired resolution and have it in front of you instead of picking through a mess of resolutions,great article by the way still consider single card setups offer best bang for the buck and less headaches. So now multi GPU questions are out of the way, how about something regarding whats around the corner? 8,9 and gtx200 is all realistically the same architecture scaled up and shrunk down. Any whispers on new GPU architectures? Starting to feel that after the rush of technological progress the last few years especially ever since the release of 8000 series cards ( long time ago now!) things really seem to have stagnated the last few months. Cheers for a great read Jared.
  • DerekWilson - Monday, March 2, 2009 - link

    Thank you ;-)
  • Slappi - Sunday, March 1, 2009 - link

    I wouldn't touch their cards with a ten foot pole.

    They are about to collapse under their debt.
  • SiliconDoc - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

    LOL - It's so much fun when a non-red rooster speculates like the raging red does all over the place.
    Thank you.
    Yes, ATI has bled BILLIONS the last couple of years, with barely over that in sales per year.
    It appears they're spending twice as much as they're selling, and that is probably not a recoverable situation - unless the new lib god Obama and the dem congress has a billion or two or more, "in the package" for them.

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