Significant Issue with CrossFire to be Aware of

Wrend · 09 Apr 2013

Figured I should make a thread about this issue in this forum as well in case you guys aren't aware of it.

Long story short: Basically, it appears that the actual output frames (not the frames "rendered") by cards in CrossFire on more GPU demanding games as apposed to CPU demanding/limiting games are about the same as if using one of those cards by itself. In these situations having an addition card in CrossFire appears to have little to no significant benefit, and may actual be a detriment to observable performance.

For more info visit the following link and/or watch the following videos.

Frame Rating Dissected: Full Details on Capture-based Graphics Performance Testing | PC Perspective

At 29 minutes in:

Hopefully AMD can resolve this issue shortly. I know I would be very concerned (to say the least) if I had gone with CrossFire AMD cards instead of having gone with SLI NVIDIA ones.

Faladu · 13 Apr 2013

Piling on....

Most users do not need 2 video cards .

First of all....

Lots of fun things to worry about that a typical user doesn't want to deal with.... and may not have even considered...

PSU requirements and the real fun one: motherboard quirks, like having one slot be a true PCI Express x16 or x8 and the rest lower.... That's evil, but when buy a cheaper mobo, you get what you pay for....

I myself am running 1 Radeon HD 7950 3gig card, taking on all comers.... gaming wise, np.

Wrend · 13 Apr 2013

Yeah, and AMD graphics cards generally offer great performance for the price too. I would just be wary of getting them for CrossFire setups at this time.

There may be a driver fix that they can do, but it may need to add in some latency so that the frames are regulated as they're output. A better fix will likely need to be a similar kind of solution, but on the hardware side of things.

Apparently NVIDIA has had frame rate metering on the hardware side of things since their Kepler GPUs, and back to the G80 on the software side. I'm not too sure about the specifics on this though.