Performance of second card in a NVIDIA SLI setup?

[Elliot B.]

Someone made something aware to me today, and I just want to check.

I feel it may be better to get 2x cards and SLI them than buy 1x Titan, as it would be cheaper and faster. I haven't done the research on this, I was just theorising.

The person told me when you SLI, you don't get 100% from both cards. In fact, he said the second card ran at 20%. Therefore, 1x Titan is still faster.

This is presuming the games in question have excellent SLI profiles.

Is this true?

[Haggis Veteran]

I dont know a  lot about this but found this

 

http://lifehacker.com/5994276/is-it-worth-it-to-run-two-graphics-cards-in-my-gaming-pc

[notchinese]

I have 2x GTX 770s and the two setups I had prior were:

 

2x 6950s

2x GTX 260s

 

You won't get exactly 2x scaling but in most games its close enough. If a game only gets 20% (or worse) scaling then the game is broken or the drivers are broken. RAGE is a good example (broken game period). But the vast majority of games work just fine. Once I switched to multi-card setups I can't go back because there is no single card that can match the performance.

[+Zlip792 MVC]

Mostly games are unoptimized for dual cards like GTA IV unless there will be a good relation between developer and hardware manufacture don't expect great SLI profile.

I personally believe single one fast card is better for running all games then two budgets cards.

[Astra.Xtreme]

If you want to upgrade to another 7870, then it's considered "Crossfire".  Two Nvidia cards together is considered "SLI".  I know, it's dumb. :)

 

You'll probably get more performance than a GTX Titan and for cheaper, but the trade-off is more noise, more heat, and higher power consumption.  

 

Here's a discussion about a 7870 Crossfire config, which might have some useful info:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2311387

 

In the past I've had GTX 460 SLI and GTX 570 SLI and both were phenomenal. I never had any issues and the performance was great for the price.

 

If you do go with a Crossfire setup, just be sure your PSU has enough juice.  When I had the 570 SLI setup, I had a Thermaltake 750W PSU, and while playing games, it would make a high-pitched whining sound, which I figured was caused by too much power draw.  I upgraded to an 850W and problem solved.

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[Jason S. Global Moderator]

whoever this person is that mentioned "only 20%" is dumb. That's simply not true.

 

with a solid CFX/SLI profile, you can get nearly double the framerates. It will not be 100% though, naturally.

 

Also, Zlip, idk what games youre playing, but all the games i play have SLI profiles...

[Elliot B.]

If you want to upgrade to another 7870, then it's considered "Crossfire".  Two Nvidia cards together is considered "SLI".  I know, it's dumb. :)

 

You'll probably get more performance than a GTX Titan and for cheaper, but the trade-off is more noise, more heat, and higher power consumption.  

 

Here's a discussion about a 7870 Crossfire config, which might have some useful info:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2311387

 

In the past I've had GTX 460 SLI and GTX 570 SLI and both were phenomenal. I never had any issues and the performance was great for the price.

 

If you do go with a Crossfire setup, just be sure your PSU has enough juice.  When I had the 570 SLI setup, I had a Thermaltake 750W PSU, and while playing games, it would make a high-pitched whining sound, which I figured was caused by too much power draw.  I upgraded to an 850W and problem solved.

I wasn't specifically talking about my card :)

A Titan is ?806.

I was hoping there was a NVIDIA card around ?380 and if so, I was thinking 2x of those (?760) would be faster and cheaper than a Titan.

However, it seems a 780 is ?503 and one step down from that, the 770, is ?325.

So I presume in terms of speed:

2x 780 (?1006)

1x Titan (?806)

2x 770 (?650)

Of course, this assumes good quality SLI profile exists for the games.

 

However, if 2x 770 beat a Titan, then it's much cheaper!

[Astra.Xtreme]

I wasn't specifically talking about my card :)

A Titan is ?806.

I was hoping there was a NVIDIA card around ?380 and if so, I was thinking 2x of those (?760) would be faster and cheaper than a Titan.

However, it seems a 780 is ?503 and one step down from that, the 770, is ?325.

So I presume in terms of speed:

2x 780 (?1006)

1x Titan (?806)

2x 770 (?650)

Of course, this assumes good quality SLI profile exists for the games.

Nvidia does a good job with SLI profiles on the major games, so as long as you keep up-to-date with their updates, I think you'll be really happy with that setup.

However, if 2x 770 beat a Titan, then it's much cheaper!

Looks like 770 SLI would be quite a bit faster than a Titan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPMsg8qqva0

 

As long as you have at least a 750W PSU, that would probably be the best route to go.

[Elliot B.]

Looks like 770 SLI would be quite a bit faster than a Titan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPMsg8qqva0

 

As long as you have at least a 750W PSU, that would probably be the best route to go.

Nice :)

 

Unless you don't have a good SLI profile for the games you play, of course. But even then, a single 770 is powerful as it is.

[Astra.Xtreme]

Nice :)

 

Unless you don't have a good SLI profile for the games you play, of course. But even then, a single 770 is powerful as it is.

Yup agreed.  (Y)

[Andre S. Veteran]

I wasn't specifically talking about my card :)

A Titan is ?806.

I was hoping there was a NVIDIA card around ?380 and if so, I was thinking 2x of those (?760) would be faster and cheaper than a Titan.

2 GTX 760s are faster and much cheaper than a Titan in most cases. I'm running that right now. Check out http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_760_sli_review,8.html

 

The thing with SLI is that obviously it adds heat output, more moving/potentially failing parts to your system, some frame latency (largely negated by the higher framerate from what I understand) + the driver has to support it for each individual game (SLI profiles), but Nvidia does a very good job of keeping up to date with its drivers. Usually a game is supported before it's even released.

[notchinese]

It depends on the cards and the games. If you care about something that isn't gpu bound in the first place(world of warcraft) then sli does nothing at all u less you're running upwards of 6 million pixels worth of screen.

For most modern games you'll see performance between 30 and 100% higher. If you're considering lower end cards (gtx 650) then titan will be faster. If you're looking at higher end configurations like gtx690 or 2x770 then multiple GPUs will tend to win out.

Ultimately you'll need to do your own research by googling benchmarks for the games/cards that you are interested in. For example

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_770_sli_review,1.html

You'll also need to keep in mind that resolution matters. At lower resolution (1080p) single card solutions perform closer to multi-gpu configurations. As resolution increases (1600p, multiple displays) multi gpu solutions start to look better.

Taking crisis 3 as an example (because its one of the most graphically demanding, and so multiple gpu snake sense even at lower resolution): a single 770 gets you around 33 FPS, two of them yields around 62 FPS (90% improvement) where a single titan is good for around 40 FPS.

Compare that to something that scales rather poorly like bioshock infinite:

http://www.legitreviews.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-770-reviewed-in-2-way-sli-and-nvidia-surround_2210/4

A single 770 is good for about 100 FPS at 1080p and 40 FPS at 3x1080p. Titan will get you 120 and 50 FPS respectively while an sli configuration of 770s is good for 175 / 64 FPS (or between 30 and 75% scaling, depending on resolution).

 

Bioshock Infinite doesn't scale poorly. 61 fps to 111 fps @ 2560x1600. That is pretty good.

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