MultiGPU Update: Finding the True Halo with 4-way
by Derek Wilson on February 28, 2009 11:45 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Prices, Stutter and The Test
We've added our four new test cases to the price lineup. Naturally they are not cheap.
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.
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JarredWalton - Sunday, March 1, 2009 - link
Fixed, thanks. Note that it's easier to fix issues if you can mention a page, just FYI. :)askeptic - Sunday, March 1, 2009 - link
This is my observation based on their review over the last couple of yearsssj4Gogeta - Sunday, March 1, 2009 - link
It's called being fair and not being biased. They did give the due credit and praise to AMD for RV770 and Phenom II. You probably haven't been reading the articles.SiliconDoc - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
He's a red fan freak-a-doo, with his tenth+ name, so anything he sees is biased against ati.Believe me, that one is totally goners, see the same freak under krxxxx names.
He must have gotten spanked in a fps by an nvidia card user so badly he went insane.
Captain828 - Sunday, March 1, 2009 - link
In the last couple of years, nVidia and Intel have had better performing hardware than the competition.So I don't see any bias and the charts don't show any either.
lk7200 - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - link
Shut the *beep* up f aggot, before you get your face bashed in and cut
to ribbons, and your throat slit.
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Another name so soon raging red fanboy freak ? Going to fantasize about murdering someone again, sooner rather than later ?If ati didn't suck so badly, and be billion dollar losers, you wouldn't be seeing red, huh, loser.
JonnyDough - Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - link
Hmm...X1900 series ring a bell? Methinks you've been drinking...Razorbladehaze - Sunday, March 1, 2009 - link
Wow, what i was really looking forward to here disappeared entirely. I was expecting to see more commentary on the subjective image quality of the benchmarks, and there was even less discussion relating to that then in the past two articles kinda a bummer.On the side note what was shown was what I expected from piecemeal of a number of other reviews. Nice to see it combined though.
The only nougat of information I found disturbing is to hear the impression that CUDA is better than what ATI has promoted. This in light of my understanding that nVidia just hired a head tech officer from the University where Stream (what ati uses) computing took roots. Albeit that CUDA is just an offshoot of this, it would seem to me that, this hiring would lead me to beleive that nvidia will be migrating towards stream rather than the opposite. Especially if GPGPU computing is to become commonplace.
I think that it would be in nVidia's best interest to do this as I am afraid that Intel is right and that nvidia's future may be bleak if GPGPU computing does not take hold and this is one strategy to migrate towards their rival AMD's GPGPU to reduce resource usage to explore this tech.
Well yeah... i think i went way way off on a tangent on this one so...yeah im done.
DerekWilson - Monday, March 2, 2009 - link
Sorry about the lack of image quality discussion. It's our observation that image quality is not significantly impacted by multiGPU. There are some instances of stuttering here and there, but mostly this is in places where performance is already bad or borderline, otherwise we did note where there were issues.As far as GPGPU / GPU computing, CUDA is a more robust and more widely adopted solution than is ATI Stream. CUDA has made more inroads in the consumer space, and especially in the HPC space than has Stream. There aren't that many differences in the programming model, but CUDA for C does have some advantages over Brook+. I prefer the fact that ATI opens up it's ISA down to the metal (along side a virtual ISA), while NVIDIA only offers a virtual ISA.
The key is honestly adoption though: the value of the technology only exists as far as the end user has a use for it. CUDA leads here. OpenCL, in our eyes, will close the gap between NVIDIA and ATI and should put them both on the same playing field.