The Verdict
Alright you guys. We've been here before, Quad Multi-GPU gaming of course can hardly be justified whatsoever. Money wise it makes no sense, power consumption wise it's just bizarre and the platform you need to build and create is outlandishly expensive. Then there's the fact that with standard 2-way SLI or Crossfire here and there there's often small issues with the drivers, especially with new games. When you go for Quad GPU gaming, these driver issues will become even more apparent. Multi-GPU gaming is just something extremely complex for the PC to do.
On that bombshell one example, we had our share of pain with the 4870 X2 CrossfireX installation. Apparantly on some configurations there is a driver bug in the 8.12 driver where X2 cards will disable the secondary adapter, or refuse to install completly. It's a known issue and it's being worked on. But as isolated as the bug is, it of course had to jinx us. We tried to solve it with the help of ATI's driver team, but we were not able to get it hotfixed in time for this particular Windows Vista based test PC, which happens to be the all new 2500 USD graphics card PC. And that's weird, this is a new PC with a rather new (fresh) Windows Vista installation, dedicated to ATI graphcis cards. To keep our Windows installations fresh and clean, we make use of "Ghost" images and often restore a complete HDD image. The Catalyst 8.12 driver just refused to install whatsoever, even with an updated internal build straight from ATI Canada's driver team.
So, the night before publishing this article, this dedicated fellah was installing a fresh Windows Vista build, and had to install all games, get Windows patched up, setup game configurations, benchmarks and timedemos. It's driver stuff like that that makes the multi-GPU experience a bit of a downer. We see this behavior too often for both team green and red. And let's be honest here, bugs like these rarely happen with single GPU graphics cards based PC's. But once we got the new Windows Vista installed and setup, we where good to go.
That aside, would I recommend to you to go for Quad GPU gaming? Aaah, difficult. Common sense would say no, not really. See, articles like these are mainly for fun, to show where we are headed performance wise. This stuff is the x-factor, bragging rights and for 99.99% of you it does not apply. But do you guys like the TV series Top Gear? (Ed: hell yeah!) Let me ask you ... why do you watch these fools drive around like crazy in the world's most expensive cars? Yep, because it's pure unadulterated fun. And that's exactly the same case with high-end graphics at this bizarre level.
Fact is however that 00.01% of you actually will go for technology shown today. The true Guru's who are willing to spend the incredible amount of money required, and those who can accept the common driver issues and the challenges ahead: we call such guys, Guru's with balls made out of steel. And as such you have to respect that, and them. See another fact is, once up and running, I enjoyed every frickin' minute with both Quad GPU configurations.
Back to reality, on average I'd say that the Radeon HD 4870 X2 CFX and GeForce GTX 295 both scale pretty darn well. Here and there we stumbled into anomalies, but this is driver stuff. On the other hand, we also had way more situations where the 4870 X2's just would not kick in 4-way GPU mode. But again .. it's all about drivers. I'm not gonna make a judgment call on who's or what graphics setup card is better, both setups are high up there in the stratosphere of game performance. But Quad GPU gaming will always be a challenge and require persistent driver support, which is it's Achilles heel.
Comparing to Quad GPU testing, say two years ago, I'm just going to say that I was surprised how few 'serious' driver issues we actually had. Sure, there were some scaling issues and oddities here and there, but the GTX 295, for example worked like a charm in most titles. So overall the experience was pretty reliable, and well ... you'd almost take the high framerates for granted, like it's a normal thing to have Far Cry 2 at 2560x1600 (DX10/4xAA) running an average of 100 frames per second.
With the game titles tested, we really didn't run into any bad atypical issues like crashes or anything. At most we noticed some scaling issues or a game that kicked back towards 2 GPUs. NVIDIA's cards work instantly with Quad SLI, there was no need to alter profiles. Props to NVIDIA for that as that really was an impressive experience for what is a very complex set of hardware. CrossfireX also was an extremely pleasant experience, though on a couple of occasions the X2 would not kick into CrossfireX (4 GPU) mode. But where it worked, it was phenomenal as well. So yeah, this was an awesome experience.
Should you for whatever reason be drooling over and opting for Quad GPU gaming, you should make sure you are on the Core i7 platform. It really makes a difference. The Core i7 processor and X58 combo rocks hard and seems to be a truly excellent match to today's multi-GPU based setups. But allow me to make it very clear though, a setup like tested today does not make any sense money wise or power consumption wise and neither will I try to defend that. Please weigh out the overall costs and disadvantages carefully before investing. But, I'll be damned if I try to deny it ... it's a heck of a lot of fun.
GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI - for bragging rights, the X-factor, unadulterated fun is what this was all about. And yours truly definitely liked it. Should you have missed it, check out our final GeForce GTX 295 review here.
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