CrossFireX Arrives: First Look at 3 and 4 GPUs in 2 Card Setups
by Derek Wilson on March 7, 2008 12:05 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
World in Conflict Performance
Version: 1.005
Settings: Medium quality plus Heat Haze, Debris Physics, and DX10
We tested this game using the built-in benchmark feature of the game. In our experience, this does a good job of testing the different graphical scenarios that can be encountered in the game.
World in Conflict, from the data, really looks like we had Vsync enabled, the system was severely CPU limited, or the framerate cap was on. However, this was not the case. These data points had minimum and maximum framerates extending from ~30 to ~160 fps, and there appears to be another factor in the resulting data looking so flat between resolutions.
The 9600 GT SLI was able to break past this barrier and post average framerates higher than 60fps. The only major difference is that that we had to use a different driver just for the 9600. Given what we experienced in our recent Dell XPS M1730 article, the 170 series drivers help significantly in World in Conflict and Crysis; unfortunately, no official beta or other driver with 8800 Ultra support is available. We are investigating further and waiting for driver updates from NVIDIA.
It seems clear that if there is some limit on performance scaling here with our test platform. We expect future driver updates to significantly help both SLI and CrossFireX.
Pushing resolution higher is the way to get more value out of multi-GPU here. Increasing settings may help, and we will go back and look at higher settings with these configurations in the future. Running at Very High is still not a viable option, but there is room for customization to end up with a workable stress test for current high-end systems.
| World in Conflict Performance | ||||
| 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 | 1920x1200 | 2560x1600 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT SLI | 73 | 68 | 63 | 51 |
| NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra SLI | 58 | 56 | 54 | 52 |
| NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra | 58 | 56 | 53 | 44 |
| NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT | 60 | 50 | 44 | 30 |
| AMD Radeon HD 3870X2 (x 2) | 63 | 60 | 60 | 58 |
| AMD Radeon HD 3870X2 + 3870 | 63 | 60 | 60 | 57 |
| AMD Radeon HD 3870X2 | 63 | 60 | 59 | 52 |
| AMD Radeon HD 3870 | 57 | 51 | 47 | 34 |
With all the data compressed under 60fps, it is hard to get a clear understanding of what's going on. In the interest of reporting what we actually saw, the above chart shows our results.
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kilkennycat - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
Multi-chip hybrid substrates with widely-spaced dies can help to spread out the heat rather nicely and help keep the overall yield up too, as Intel has demonstrated with the quad Core 2 processors. I fully expect hybrid substrates to become a popular interim solution to the need for masively-parallel processing GPUs -like IBMs 20-chip solution for their big number-crunchers. The hybrid/chip combo- architecture can be designed to externally emulate a single GPU. Also a very nice way of adding some extra local memory if necessary.DerekWilson - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
i agree that this is good direction to go, but even with intel we've still got dual socket boards for multicore chips ...the real answer for the end user is always get as fast a single card as possible and if you need more than one make it as few and as powerful cards as you can.
e6600 - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
no crysis benchies?Slash3 - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
Crysis is broken as a benchmark... despite all pre-release hype, the game seems to scale very badly across multiple cores and multiple GPUs. It's is kind of unfortunate, as if there's one game that could benefit from efficient scaling, it's Crysis.JarredWalton - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
I'm curious to see if version 1.2 fixes anything... it might. That just came out yesterday, so I don't think many have had a chance to look at whether or not performance changed.[Just checked]
At least for single GPUs, I see no real change in performance. I haven't had a chance to test multi-GPU, and all I have right now is SLI and CrossFire. Could be that v1.2 will help more with 3-way and 4-way configs. We'll see.
DerekWilson - Saturday, March 8, 2008 - link
there was no perf benefit at all from going to 3 or 4 gpus ... we saw this in our preview and when we tested the 8.3 driver. we mention that on the test page ...