GeForce GTX 275 and Radeon HD 4890 Round-Up
SLI and Crossfire Testing
Having the sheer number of cards at our disposal begs for some dual and even triple GPU combinations. Luckily for us, having an Intel X58-based motherboard allows us to run both our GeForce GTX 275s in 3-way SLI and 3 Radeon HD 4890s in CrossFireX - no need for swapping out parts.
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Doubling the number of cards has almost but not quite the effect one would expect - the overall performance and frame rates were just under twice the original scores. With the GeForce GTX 275 already enjoying a comfortable lead with single GPU testing, that margin of difference now becomes nearly double when comparing SLI to Crossfire results. Adding in a third card to the mix obviously increases performance even further, but to a lesser degree than we saw when adding in the second.
Benchmarking Crysis with the same combinations of cards points out that 3-way SLI performance is scaling better than the CrossFireX combo, at least in this game. Whereas the GTX 275 saw increases of 83% when using 2 cards, and 167% in total when going with 3 GPUs, the Radeon HD 4890 "only" received a 60% boost when running in Crossfire with 2 GPUS, and 94% total gain with three HD 4890s running in tandem. This might be something that ATI should look at with newer Catalyst drivers, as the multi-GPU advantage when running Crysis is surely in NVIDIA's court.
