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Originally Posted by 99th_Flyby
good input, man. I'm of the same opinion about Crossfire and SLi. Neither one scales well as a matter of leading edge technology. It's a matter of which individual game benefits from either technology so far as I can see. In IL2, I haven't seen anyone post that his/her two cards scale 100%, giving twice the fps of one card. I think many still find using two cards problematic. Then there's the promise of Hydra. I've read about Hydra allowing two or more GPUs to scale nearly perfectly. So far I'm of the opinion that Crossfire, and SLi are more hype and clever marketing rather than bleeding edge technology, at least for the sims I like. Both have been around for a while and still no 100% scaling from either, as far as I know. I may be way off base, but I think it's a shame how ATi and Nvidia tout these imperfect technologies; not to mention how the motherboard manufacturers jump on the money-sucking bandwagon as well. Sorry if I stepped on any toes.
I also agree with you about monitors and dual GPUs. Unless it's a humongous monitor like a 30 inch being played at 2560x and trying to get a game like Crysis to run smooth at that rez, I think a good single GPU with 1ghz of ram, like the GTX 280 is more than enough card for lesser monitors; certainly enough for a single 22 inch monitor anyway. Be mindful that not all 1ghz GPUs are created equal either. One day I'd like to get a nice speedy quad Penryn. Maybe the prices will continue to drop, or I can trade in blood? I'm thinking a single GPU on a P45 chipset, and a quad that I can easily overclock to, oh, 3.6ghz (on air cooling).
OK. I need to shut up now. Opinions expressed here are not my own as I am a mindless minion of the Evil Empire.
Flyby out
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A lot of the comments are pretty much spot on however having gone SLI I can assure you SLI does pay off even with these older Sims.
In short you guys are both right about the resolution scaling. Unless you're running 1600X and above I don't really see the point of going SLI or a super high end video card but here is the caveat.
When it comes to scaling we are somewhat misled by looking at the FPS numbers. Most guys like ATI and Nvidia want you to see the high numbers but that's only part of the whole CPU GPU equation. For most games it's not about the high number. It really comes down to the MINIMUM number of FPS you experience in a game. That's the real kicker isn't it. We could care less when things are running above 60fps but we all see it when it's less.
This is really driven out of all the systems and subsystems of a computer. Nothing new here.
SLI does scale quite nicely when you're dealing with games that are heavy on the GPU side. Which quite frankly is the majority of the games. Sims are typically CPU bound. But it would be interesting to see how well a sim would fly if it took advantage of the number crunching capabilities of a GPU.
Moving forward. I went from a single 8800GT to SLI running 1920X1200 and it literally doubled my performance. I could then turn on AA and AF and even take advantage of the higher terrain setting. I've turned off my other card to see what the difference was and the sim crawled.
Also having gone SLI I've had Zero problems running some of the latest and greatest games with the exception of one game. Crysis was the only one that SLI didn't improve anything. Now that could be somewhat driver related but it really didn't do much.
Games like COD4 doubled in FPS so I think it's a matter of games that take advantage of SLI or CF.
My 2 Pennies