so the purpose of today's video is going to be to evaluate quad crossfire with
dual Radeon 6990s which you can see on my bench right now
against quad sli with dual dual jewel dual gtx
590 so those are
about to go on the bench so i'm going to be using a different test platform from
what i normally use this is a Gigabyte g1 sniper motherboard
and it is running with an Intel core i7 980 x at 4.26 gigahertz or something
like that so i'm well over 4 gigahertz i have 12 gigs of ddr3 1600 RAM i am using
a different power supply as well but i've got my regular testing hard drive
and then because my external drive broke i'm using a wd green drive for my steam
files so that is the test bench i will be using to determine which of these
configurations runs better you may have noticed already that it's a little on
the warm side oh no not warm side it's a little on the loud side the reason for
that is that you can see these rubber spacers that come on the 6990s
here yeah now you can see it that is to give it see you can see at
the bottom it's very close together at the top it's
slightly separated that gives it a little bit of a gap for that fan to
intake air but it still has to work pretty hard to cool those two gpus
so it is a little on the loud side here you
can see my lost planet two results i'm going to be comparing
the quad crossfire against the quad sli and then if i have time i will also run
individual 6990 and individual gtx 590
numbers to compare against their dual
graphics equivalents although it's not equivalent
at all so i've got most of my testing done i'm
just running the lost planet 2 bench on the gtx 590 quad sli configuration so of
note about this particular video is the fact that i will be using a higher
resolution than normal you can see my 1920x1080 monitor is actually back there
behind my 30 inch 2560x1600 monitor also because we are
using very high-end GPU configurations i will be using higher anti-aliasing in
isotropic filtering settings than i normally do so i'll be cranking up
as high as they go for all of the games in my testing suite which will be
battlefield bad company 2 crisis 2 metro 2033 and lost planet 2. so for the first
three games i'll be doing my own custom run-throughs recorded with fraps and for
lost planet 2 i'm using test b you can see here i have the gtx 590s on
the test bench they're not nearly as loud as the 6990s
although they do get toasty and they do get loud running in a configuration like
this especially that top card although you can see the spacing is significantly
more than we were seeing previously with
our other config you can actually see all the way through it and both cards
are able to sit straight in their slots
you may ask why i chose to use the slots
that are right next to each other on this board versus this one right here
and the reason as you can see in the PCIe slot there is that
this bottom slot is only wired for 8x so if i were to use these two high-end gpus
uh in the top and the bottom PCIe 16x slots on the g1 sniper i'd be running
them at 16x and 8x mode respectively and
based on my recent testing with PCIe bandwidth i felt that was not really
appropriate so i would have liked to use the two 16x slots which is what i've
decided to do here so i will be back with the results once i'm finished
running my single gtx 590 tests all right guys so i'm using the latest
drivers available at the time of filming and benchmarking which is all on the
same night tonight and uh here are the settings that i was
using so crisis 2 is obviously at maximum so the game that scaled the best
out of the ones in my test suite was obviously battlefield bad company too uh
the 6990s um actually scale more than a hundred
percent which makes no sense but uh we'll just consider that within the
margin of error and we'll call it 100 scaling and then for the 590s we saw
almost 100 scaling something like 90 scaling so excellent scaling on that
particular game 590 scaled very very well in crisis 2. 69.90 besides the
flickering bug which made the game pretty much unplayable
also didn't scale very well AMD has some work to do on the crisis 2 performance
of their 6990 but i'm sure that's something they'll resolve with a driver
issue in the future metro 2033
6990 scaled quite well uh adding another
50 performance to itself as well as the 590 590 actually scaled quite well as
well but still falls short of the quad crossfire setup in terms of overall
performance on lost planet 2 we see very
poor scaling across the board and the 590 sli beats a little crossfire
as well as on battlefield bad company 2
the 590 quad sli wins so basically the
objective today was not to determine a clear winner it was more to look at the
state of quad GPU gaming as a whole i'm not going to say
who but i well actually okay i got blue screens with both solutions during my
testing among other sort of random issues that
did crop up so i would go as far as to say that there's definitely some work to
do on the drivers for uh both of these cards and uh but once that's resolved
they definitely deliver some crazy performance numbers in the
right scenarios remember these are all benchmarked at 2560 by 1600 so we're
looking at battlefield bad company 2 numbers well over 100 FPS