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- Date:
- Friday , October 08, 2010
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Share:
ATI CrossFireX vs. NVIDIA SLI New Games Performance
We want to know how three brand new games perform with SLI and CFX. We take F1 2010, Civilization V and Dead Rising 2 through our apples-to-apples testing using GTX 480 SLI, HD 5870 CFX and GTX 460 SLI. This is a must read, as it reveals some rather unforgiving truths about new game releases and multi-GPU technology.
Introduction
Once again we look at ATI’s CrossFireX versus NVIDIA’s SLI in terms of real world gaming performance, but this time we are using three brand new games that have just been released. This will show us how CrossFireX and SLI perform in new game releases and if AMD and NVIDIA are keeping up with CrossFireX and SLI support. We want to see if AMD or NVIDIA might have an edge in performance or if CrossFireX or SLI are even working, and if there are any bugs or issues specifically running in NV Surround and ATI Eyefinity.
Our apples-to-apples performance comparison is going to be very eye opening, and this is a must read if you are just as concerned about new game releases and CrossFireX and SLI compatibility as we are. This article will reveal some hard truths that AMD and NVIDIA need to be aware of.
Let’s get straight to it; there is a lot to discuss.
Test Setup
Drivers
We want to be very clear on what drivers are being used here.
ATI Radeon HD 5870 CrossFireX - Catalyst 10.9 WHQL and CAP 10.9.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and 460 SLI - ForceWare 260.63 Beta and Latest SLI Profile Update. Note that this SLI Update is old, dated back in August, and in the case of the games tested today, we had to uninstall it in order to actually get SLI working in some, we will discuss this.
We are using two reference GeForce GTX 480 video cards. We are using two reference ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB video cards. We are using two Galaxy GeForce GTX 460 1GB Super OC video cards which are clocked at 810MHz GPU, 1600MHz shader and 4GHz memory. We will be testing in an apples-to-apples configuration at 2560x1600 and 5760x1200 ATI Eyefinity and NV Surround.
The system specifications are MSI Eclipse, Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.6GHz, 6GB DDR3, Dell 3007WFP, Win7 x64.
2560x1600 - Single Display
F1 2010
We are going to start with F1 2010 because quite frankly, it was the only game to give us no trouble at all. The game ran stable and freaky fast on all configurations of video cards tested here today. Though there is an obvious performance issue that we will explain below.
F1 2010 was released on September 21st, and immediately this game piqued our interest. Based on the familiar DiRT 2 engine, this game is packed ready to exploit DX11, but it doesn’t quite do so yet out-of-the-box. In fact, a DX11 patch is forthcoming that will enable DX11 effects and bring more visual quality to the already very visually appealing game. For an idea of what to expect with DX11, read here. While the game does not yet ship with DX11 support, it does run in DX9 quite brilliantly, and for a DX9 game, the visuals are quite stunning. For testing, we chose the McLaren/Mercedes Formula 1 team and raced a full grid for six laps on the Melbourne track with heavy rain enabled.
As noted in the introduction, we had to remove the August SLI update patch, as when this was installed we experienced SLI to be broken in the game. Upon removing the patch, and re-installing just the driver, SLI was working again in this game. That SLI patch is old, and apparently it did interfere with this game, so remove it if you are having SLI issues in this game and use ForceWare 260.63.
Immediately you notice how high the framerates are on all video card configurations; all of these are above 60 FPS at 2560x1600 with 8X MSAA; this is quite astonishing and a very welcomed level of performance.
However, there is one trend that sticks out like a sore thumb, and that is the fact that Radeon HD 5870 CrossFireX is not as fast as Galaxy GeForce GTX 460 Super OC 1GB SLI. The two Galaxy GTX 460 video cards are providing a higher average framerate than the HD 5870 CFX. However, HD 5870 CFX does provide a slightly higher minimum and maximum FPS. GeForce GTX 480 SLI is about 11% faster than Radeon HD 5870 CFX. This shows that CrossFireX is lagging behind SLI in this game, even if at these framerates you can’t tell the difference, the point is that it is lagging behind the competition.
Civilization V
Civilization V is the next new game we are going to play, this game was also released on September 21st. Civ V is a native DX11 game that also supports DX9. When you launch the game, you have the option to run either in DX9 mode or DX10/DX11 mode from the launcher. This interview with the developers will make you realize how much thought was put into using DX11 to improve performance and visual quality in this game; DirectCompute was a huge asset for this game. I can attest that this is by far the best looking game of this game type that I have played, but it isn’t 100% perfect as there were some graphics glitches that we experienced.
It seems that textures did not always stream through correctly, and this happened on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware. There were often grey patches of tiles that did not show the correct texture until we zoomed. There were also other tiles away from my main cities that were being explored, but ended up turning black until we zoomed in close to them. We have screenshot examples below:
In the first screenshot you can see that our combat unit has already moved through this area, yet there appears to be a rectangle shaped gray area below them. In the second screenshot we have zoomed in closer, and the correct texture streams in, yet you can actually still see a portion of texture in the top left area that is still grayed. In the third screenshot you can clearly see a black square that has appeared.
We can only conclude at this point that these are game bugs, since it happened on both NVIDIA and AMD hardware, still, it needs to be looked at as it can be very annoying.
Our run-through in these types of games are often hard to do, for today’s testing we have simply gone through and played the game as you would at home. We have created a saved game and started from the same starting point in each run-through and frapsed ourselves playing the game, performing the same actions, for ten minutes. Many gameplay elements are included, combat, zooming, panning, city view, creating units and cities.
Performance this time showing ATI Radeon HD 5870 CrossFireX in a very good light. What it seemed to us is that SLI is simply broken in Civ 5. However, we did enable the SLI indicators and they were on and visible in this game, and in fact they were fully loaded throughout playing the game, indicating that SLI was functioning. As you can see though, performance does not add up if SLI were really working like it should.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and Galaxy GeForce GTX 460 SLI flat lined between 30-40 FPS here. ATI Radeon HD 5870 CrossFireX really steals the show here and provides an average of 101 FPS, or a 126% performance advantage over GTX 480 SLI. For once, CrossFireX is not the one broken in a new game to launch.
We think we might know what is causing this, but this is just an educated guess. We notice that performance is actually quite high as our evaluation begins. However, once we come into contact with our first civilization and are greeted by them in the leader screen, once that whole discussion is over with the leader the performance drops severely as you can see around the 46 second marker, and then it just stays there and never recovers. It seems that maybe the leader screen is killing SLI and it just can’t recover afterwards. At least, this is where we saw the performance drop off, if this is the cause, we do not know, only that this needs to be looked into because SLI is for all intents and purposes, not working. For the very brief time that we do see it working, it seems to scale the way you think it would; 480, 5870, 460.
Dead Rising 2
Dead Rising 2 was released on September 28th and is the third game we are using today. This game makes no excuses that it is a console port, and it really shows in the PC version. There has been a lot of criticism about the gameplay mechanics, but through all of it the game is still a heck of a lot of fun. There aren’t many graphics options, it runs in DX9 and it is very buggy. So buggy in fact that a list has been compiled of all the problems to date and how to fix them.
We will add a couple more issues to that list, one of which is performance, and the other being incompatibility with NV Surround and ATI Eyefinity widescreen resolutions.
No matter what we tried we could not get this game to display at 5760x1200 resolution with NV Surround and ATI Eyefinity. We have run the game at triple screen resolution of 3600x1920 without issue, although it looks somewhat gnarly. Many times the game would seem like it was applying the resolution, but then the screen would just go black except for the mouse cursor. Sometimes it would hard lock the machine. Sometimes we could still hear the game so we knew it was running, we just couldn’t see it. And some times it would start up in what looked like 800x600 stretched across all three screens. In fact when we were presented with a black screen and sound, knowing what buttons to press to start a new game I was able to start a new game without seeing it, confirming the game was running but it was just not visible. We also tried forcing the resolution through the INI file, with no success. This was with all video cards tested here today, so it appears to be a game issue.
Our run-through is one of the longest we have done at fourteen minutes long but really encompasses a lot of gameplay. There is of course the mindless killing of zombies and blood splatter along with cut scenes which are rendered in-engine, so we have tried to get it all in there. This game does suffer from a lot of load screens though which makes the framerates jump, so you will see a lot of spikes in performance in the graphs.
We said the other issue was performance, and here you can see why. Just like SLI dropped the ball in Civ 5, in Dead Rising 2 it is CrossFireX that is dropping the ball. It seems to us that ATI CrossFireX is simply not working in Dead Rising 2 and we are only receiving the performance of one Radeon HD 5870 in this game.
GeForce GTX 480 is 63% faster than Radeon HD 5870 CrossFireX, and Galaxy GeForce GTX 460 is 40% faster than Radeon HD 5870 CrossFireX. There is no question that CrossFireX is not working properly in this game, giving the performance advantage to the competition big time.
However, not all is rosy on the NVIDIA side here either. You will see that there isn’t a large difference in performance between GTX 480 SLI and GTX 460 SLI, like you would expect there to be. We enabled the SLI indicators and found that SLI was enabled in this game, but the level meter was never fully loaded. In fact, it never even got up to half way loading both GPUs; it stayed rather low indicating poor SLI utilization. Therefore, we think performance could be even better but it seems that even SLI isn’t performing as well in this game as it does in others.