MultiGPU Update: Does 3-way Make Sense?

Prices, Stutter, and The Test

We are using the same prices we listed earlier this week, as not much as changed since then. This price data does include our 3-way solutions and we've put the numbers into a graph rather than a table to help see the relative pricing of these parts more easily.

We often hear users wondering about micorstutter when we talk about multiGPU solutions. We do play all these games with all these solutions in addition to running the benchmarks. Our benchmark data is only a way to quantitatively show relative performance, it's not a substitute for experience. When we run into issues that disrupt our experience, we note them and report them. One such issue is microstutter.

Microstutter is what happens when we see a high average framerate but experience frequent choppiness in the form of lower framerates interspersed with much higher framerates. The experience can be hard to notice but at times frustrating. Typically, we don't notice this as a problem with current drivers on modern games with 2-way solutions. Looking at 3-way and 4-way configurations is a different story though.

With lower memory 3-way 3 card solutions, we do notice some microstutter sometimes. Pairing a single card dual GPU AMD card with a single card single GPU option to get 3-way CrossFireX also seems to have a positive impact on microstutter. The worst offenders are the 3 card 4870 512MB and the 3 card 9800 GTX+. The 4850 tends to fail all around rather than stutter when the 4870 512MB runs into problems.

It's very difficult to really collect high quality quantitative data that shows microstutter, as the only way to really get a good idea of what's going on is to analyze raw frame data on a per frame basis (which you can't get with FRAPS). At the same time, while sometimes we can catch a whiff of microstutter, we don't feel it is a significant problem here. Actually, there are other problems (like return on your investment) that do more to get in the way of us recommending a 3-way solution. But we'll talk about all that later.

Our test system is unchanged from the previous installment except that we've also tested 3-way solutions. For our 3-way 4870 1GB, we used one 4870 X2 and one 4870 1GB card, but for all other 3-way solutions we used 3 cards. Because we could only get ahold of 2 GTX 285 cards, our 3-way GTX 285 setup is done with 3x overclocked GTX 280 cards (which will perform the same).