so I could just be a total Butthead and say well I made a video about NVIDIA's
SLI so go watch that this is the same
except your cards from AMD and we call it Crossfire but that would be lazy and
we strive for maximum professionalised
around here and truthfully it's not that simple
anyway there are some critical differences between SLI and Crossfire
that I believe demonstrate a fundamental difference in philosophy between AMD and
NVIDIA but first the basics both Technologies are pretty much a way to
utilize more than one graphics card working in tandem in your PC to achieve
nextg class performance that wouldn't otherwise be available with the current
technology due to power thermal or other
limitations think of it kind of like if you could buy two Xbox Ones bolt them
together and actually run your games at 1080p burn anyway they both work with
anywhere from two to three or even four compatible cards in one system and
perform their best at high resolutions with graphically demanding games they
also both dramatically increase the power consumption and heat output of
your computer system without having a proportional impact on the performance
you'll get in games in fact another thing they share in common is that if
the game doesn't have a profile implemented they may not improve
performance at all but with that said If
you're looking for an experience that simply isn't available today by other
means like butter smooth 4K or 1080p
surround gaming then you're likely one of the folks that this solution was
designed for all right so a moment ago I mentioned compatible cards this is
differentiation Point number one for AMD
while NVIDIA allows mix and matching of vendors and clock speeds you can SLI and
EVGA reference card with an ASUS overclocked one they require you to use
exactly the same Graphics process processor with the same memory
configuration AMD on the other hand it's pretty Loosey Goosey you can mix vendors
clock speeds RAM amounts and even the graphics processor as long as the cards
are within the same architectural family so for example a
7973 gig card can Crossfire with a 7950
with 3 gig or even an r9280x with six gigs of RAM cuz they're
all based on that same GPU differentiation Point number two for AMD
is cost NVIDIA requires SLI certification for your cards to
recognize your system as compatible and activate their Wonder Twin powers for
that NVIDIA requires the qualifying PCI
Express slots to run at 8X minimum even though these days a 4X PCI E gen 3 slot
is plenty for pretty much any graphics card and they require the board
manufacturer to pay a licensing fee you can find AMD Crossfire compatibility on
product pages for like business business class boards basically anything goes as
long as it's got a couple PCI Express 16x physical slots differentiation Point
number three is something that's actually still a work in progress for
AMD since the beginning of dual GPU Solutions with Voodoo SLI there's been
some kind of connector attaching the cards with AMD r9290 series cards and
presumably future ones as well all communication between the Cards is done
over the PCI Express bus it's a higher
bandwidth clean looking solution to the problem of how these cards can sync data
with each other at high speed when they're working together finally
differentiation Point number four is that AMD allows their cards their
low-end cards to run in crossfire with the onboard Graphics of their apus which
are CPUs that have strong onboard Graphics components although this
solution still needs some work to be something that I'd really recommend and
I guess that's it I guess that's the philosophical difference between AMD and
NVIDIA NVIDIA locks things down which gives them tighter control over the
consistency of the user's experience but AMD offers more flexibility and choice
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the video description thanks for watching guys and just so you know I was
actually kind of serious at the beginning there the SLI video I mentioned at the very start of this one
has some great information about dual GPU configurations in general and this
one was more meant to augment that one with a focus on the key differences for
AMD users anyway like and share this video if you liked it dislike it if you
disliked it leave a comment if you have something to say to me or the rest of
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