Gamer’s Issue: Single GPU vs. SLI/Crossfire?
Well, Icarus here again. I’ve been seeing a lot of people in other forums, lately talking about upgrading their GPU capabilities. Most of these I’ve seen are SLI. I’ve seen a couple people talk about Crossfire, but since so many people are blindly biased to nVidia, I will talk about SLI.
First of all, let me clear up a HUGE misunderstanding that most people have when they begin researching for their dream computer: SLI/CROSSFIRE IS NOT AN UPGRADE PATH. So many people are misunderstanding this key concept because many people are completely blinded by the media.
Here, let me give you a personal example. I used to have the same misconception when I began my journey into Computer hardware. I was so eager, that I often took time to look at benchmarks from other sites. However, I stumbled on a benchmark presented by the company, nVidia, itself that showed how much more performance you get from having 8800GTS’s in SLI than a single 8800GTS. Well, that was then. Now, recently, when brands and retailers officially released their 9800GX2 GPU’s, I was not blinded anymore: I knew what I was doing. So I looked through the benchmark, and yes, I found it in small script: Single GPU FPS: 60 FPS.
Ok, so you get 60FPS with one GPU. Do you know how many FPS’s you can go up to until you can’ts ee the difference. It’s somewhere around 40-45FPS; I actually experimented, and there was an actual scientific experiment for it(believe me, there was.). Ok, so… you can’t see the difference past 45FPS, so what’s the extra 15FPS there for? Nothing, it just sits there. Also, take into account that 60FPS is JUST AN AVERAGE: most of the current games have many scenes where it demands a pretty significant amount of GPU power, and there are still some scenes where you just run around and there’s not so much action. There’ll always be a pretty large time frame in many games where the game doesn’t demand that much GPU power, and your FPS will skyrocket. Then you won’t need the extra GPU power. So what’s the point in having extra GPU power if you’re not going to use it?
The blind acceptance of SLI/Crossfire also comes from how the media advertises not only in benchmarks, but by the status it holds. If you have a computer w/ Crossfire-ed ATi 3870X2, that’s some status there… at least according to ATi. ATi and nVidia both advertise their GPU’s in ways that creates the illusion of superiority and… well, it just looks cool. No, don’t get blinded by those advertisements. Think about what you need before what you want: do you really need a 2 powerful GPU’s, a GPU that already gives you enough power to play the games you want and the videos you want to watch?
Another component to this argument: monitor size and resolution. If you already get above 45FPS average on a 24″ monitor with one GPU, why would you need another? You don’t, that extra one’ll just cost you a couple hundred dollars with no physical gains, only in benchmarking numbers. Generally, my rule of thumb is, that if you’re on a 24″+ monitor at native resolution, you might want to consider SLI/Crossfire. If you’re anywhere under that, you won’t need it.
Well, that’s all for now. If I come up with any other issues, I will post them here. Also, if you have any questions regarding this topic, feel free to leave a comment. I will be more than glad to answer your questions regarding this issue. Thanks for reading my posts, and have a great day!
Icarus
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