Chakka
02-21-2008, 06:54 PM
Anandtech posted an interesting article on crossfirex performance and they also compared that to SLI. Virtually no improvement when adding a 4th gpu over 3 gpus. So the largest gain for the price seems to be just adding a 2nd gpu generating an 80% increase in performance over 1 gpu but only another 25-30% gain by going from 2 to 3 gpus. Looks like virtually no gains when adding a 4th. It seems to make sense to me to have 2 gpus (either 2 cards or 2 gpus on 1 card), but for the price of a 3rd card and the gain in performance it doesnt seem worth the price to go to 3 and definitely not adding a 4th. Maybe the best solution is 1 3870x2 and a sole 3870 (if that is even doable) if you want to push the life of your rig until the next upgrade cycle.
From the article: "The move from one to two cards generally yields a healthy performance improvement, but the gains taper off as we look at the performance added by a third GPU. Call of Duty 4 is the only game that shows solid gains with 4 GPUs (29% over a 3-GPU configuration), the rest of the titles show mostly single-digit percentage improvements. Once again we see that Crysis simply needs new, faster GPU architectures - four GPUs does absolutely nothing for this game."
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3232&p=3
From the article: "The move from one to two cards generally yields a healthy performance improvement, but the gains taper off as we look at the performance added by a third GPU. Call of Duty 4 is the only game that shows solid gains with 4 GPUs (29% over a 3-GPU configuration), the rest of the titles show mostly single-digit percentage improvements. Once again we see that Crysis simply needs new, faster GPU architectures - four GPUs does absolutely nothing for this game."
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3232&p=3