The Verdict.
Well, it's not a secret ... both Crossfire & SLI scale pretty darn well with our tested games. The 4850 CF still gains the advantage as well as being slightly cheaper than the 9800 GTX+, and that will keep hounding NVIDIA's product for sure. Hey in this business every EUR spent counts, obviously. So whether you opt ATI or NVIDIA, honestly performance wise there's just not much difference. But bang for bucks wise, you might gain a little more from the Radeon 4850. Feature wise the Radeon cards have DX 10.1 support which definitely is a pro as well, and next month we'll start seeing the X2 products as well.
When we focus on NVIDIA, the 9800 GTX+ cards definitely look more aesthetically pleasing with the total black design but more importantly, I just like the cooling solution better. See, the dual slot coolers simple have a nice advantage, the push the heat outside of the PC and that's much better then that heat being dumped inside you PC, in the end heating up other components as well.
So then, for roughly 350 EUR / 400 USD you get to play around with a grand amount of performance, there's just no denying that. In retrospective two of these cards will beat the GeForce GTX 280, pretty easily actually. Though in memory bound situations that card just offers so much more in high resolutions. But that card is 499 USD.
Personally my preference tends to go with single GPU based cards, honestly there's just less hassle and driver issues to worry about. In the end with a new game you'll need a new driver to get the best SLI support. That or creating a SLI profile from within the drivers itself and praying that it'll work. SLI however has matured a lot ever since it's release a couple of years ago and this definitely again was a pleasant experience.
When we purely focus at the 9800 GTX+ SLi scaling, we then see that after 1600x1200 SLI kicks in very well. In the situations where you get really GPU bound you'll notice your performance nearly doubly up, and that's just very decent performance. But that is the denominator in the back of my mind, you need to play your games above a resolution of 1600x1200 for SLi to kick in hard and to be able to witness that return of your investment. Well, that or playing Crysis actually :)
My favorite game at this very moment is Mass Effect. I play it at 2560x1600 with the image quality settings as defined in this review. With one GTX+ card still averages at 37 frames per second (which already is bloody nice for the money), however with that second GTX+ added I end up at an average FPS of 70. It is an excellent modern title that shows Multi-GPU gaming potential so well with. And that's where you need to seek the true benefit, modern games.
Anyway, I hope this article answered the dozens of requests we received regarding 4850 CF versus 9800 GTX+ SLi performance !
Right, one last photo guys, then I'm heading off to writing the next article ... man this is a busy summer, you'd almost hate it to go on vacation eh ? :)
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