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Is SLI and Crossfire a Con job?

  • 21-08-2008 08:33AM
    #1
    Scram
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 683 ✭✭✭


    I dont know much About SLI and Crossfire but from what ive read it seems to be con.

    Is it true that the game your playing must support it? and that most dont? The Performance Gains are very poor from what ive seen. Am i talking nonsence?

    Seems to me its like the 64bit CPU and OS there nice to hve but do feck all more.


Comments

  • #2
    uberpixie
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,864 ✭✭✭uberpixie


    Scram wrote: »
    I dont know much About SLI and Crossfire but from what ive read it seems to be con.

    Is it true that the game your playing must support it? and that most dont? The Performance Gains are very poor from what ive seen. Am i talking nonsence?

    Seems to me its like the 64bit CPU and OS there nice to hve but do feck all more.

    is it a con job? Yes and no.

    SLI/crossfire only come into their own on 24"-30" screens running at huge resolution and high antialiasing.

    After that it comes down to if the game actually supports sli/crossfire and scales well.

    If the game does well and good, if it doesn't your 2nd card is sitting on its arse giving out heat and taking up power.
    In general its a waste on smaller screens and usually a better card is out in 6 months that offers the same performance of 2 SLIed/Crossfired cards with out any of the hicups and giving uniform performance in all games.

    However there is a tech called "Hydra" that a 3rd party is behind which may actually make SLI/crossfire work "properly".

    Have a look at this thread here:
    http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055359787


  • #3
    Overheal
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 86,683 ✭✭✭✭Overheal


    I have hopes for what hydra claims to be but we'll have to wait to see some benchmarks.

    But youre dead right SLi/Crossfire is a crock. Even if you were luking to use a multi-GPU setup you'd be better off getting an X2 card from either nvidia or ati.


  • #4
    astrofool
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2, Paid Member Posts: 17,626 ✭✭✭✭astrofool


    The software side of SLI is where the big problem is, I don't see how another software based product (hydra), is going to be able to solve that at all.

    However, the best place for something like SLI is next gen consoles, less demanding games can run on one GPU, and high end games can use both, because the platform is static, software optimisation can be performed relatively easily, as all games will have a profile.


  • #5
    Blazer
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,510 ✭✭✭✭Blazer


    I just a good review on Anandtech I think where they saw a demo of it and they were pretty impressed by what they saw.
    Providing it's cheap and the card companies support it, it could be a major winner. it..ppl will still buy 2 cards but now have a better way of increasing performance..let's hope they make it.


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