Date:
Monday , October 20, 2008
Category:
GPU / Video Cards
Manufacturers:
AMD-ATI & NVIDIA
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett

Crysis Warhead and Stalker CS - Multi-GPU Gameplay

Want to know how AMD’s CrossFire and NVIDIA’s SLI perform in Crysis: Warhead and Stalker: Clear Sky in DX10 at HD resolutions? We put new-gen CrossFire and SLI head-to-head in six setup configurations to show you what they can deliver.

Introduction

This evaluation is simple; we want to find out what kind of gameplay experience AMD’s CrossFire and NVIDIA’s SLI configurations will allow in two of today’s hottest games. We have been looking for the pinnacle of DirectX 10 gaming, and currently there are two major game releases that both support DX10. We’ve recently looked at gameplay performance and image quality in Crysis: Warhead and Stalker: Clear Sky with single video card configurations. It is now time to test these games with CrossFire and SLI and see what kind of gameplay experience we receive for our investment.

DX10 for Two

As noted above, both these new games support DX10, Crysis: Warhead will launch in this API by default on Vista with a DX10 video card. For Stalker: Clear Sky you can select the “Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting (DX10)“ render path, which we found playable on all video cards compared today. This means that for the first time we have more than just Crysis to compare DX10 performance with finally. We highly suggest you read our Crysis: Warhead and Stalker: Clear Sky evaluations first, as this article will not deep dive into the specific quality settings on each game, which we have covered here recently.

Six Configurations for CF/SLI

From AMD’s camp we have Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire, Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire, Radeon HD 4870 X2 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX. From NVIDIA’s camp we have GeForce GTX 260 SLI (original) and GeForce GTX 280 SLI. We decided to use the original 192 stream processor GeForce GTX 260 rather than the new 216 core card for a couple of reasons. Firstly, our evaluations have proven there aren’t any tangible gameplay differences between either. Secondly, the 192 core card can be found for a very low $230 which is $45 less than the least expensive 216 core card. Putting together an original GTX 260 setup will cost less than a Radeon HD 4870 X2 currently. On our tables we have grouped the video cards by cost from lowest to highest.