

StarCraft 2 is clearly bottlenecked by our host platform. But CrossFire is performing very poorly here in comparison to the competition, with the single-card performance faring better than two cards in CrossFire mode. Hopefully, AMD will address this problem with a Catalyst Control Center profile update in the near future.
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What they seem to miss is that these are all single chip cards, and the 5970 is a dual chip (effectively allready crossfired card) ...so i guess they either dont get what hardware they are using, or are ranting due to feeling "left out" ... poor things *gets a mini violin for them*
Good article, allthough a little late for me as i won't purchase another card for some time yet.
Good reads tho.
"At 2560x1600, the GeForce cards in SLI fare a little better. It may be the extra video RAM on the GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 480 that is helping out here." Please explain to me how the GTX 470 is being helped when it is outperformed by the HD 5850 in both single and multi-card setups. I think that your wording was incorrect at best or intentionally misleading at worst.
It's like watching a football referee making an obviously bad call that leaves you scratching your head.
I think it's that both the 470 sli & 480 sli were getting outperformed by a 5-6% margin at 1920x1080, then that margin dropped to 1.5% for the 470 to the 5850, and the 480 overtook the 5870 at 2560x1600.
You would expect a card that is faster at a lower resolution to still be faster at a higher resolution, well the 5850 was but it's lead had dropped significantly.
The author is attempting to explain why this happened, and illustrates this further in later benchmarks where this effect is exagerated even more. In the conclusion he sums up by saying if you're only going to play with a single screen at 1920x1080, this isn't an issue. If you plan to game with triple screen eyefinity or Nvidia surround, you will see that same drop off in performance with ATI as it's 1GB memory becomes a bottleneck in the cards performance when it tries to render 5760x1080.
The reason they din't compare the 5970 is because it's a dual GPU. the point of this article is to compare 2 video cards in Sli or Crossfire. When Nvidia launches a dual-gpu card then we'll see some Quad-Sli to quad Crossfire setups, which should be interesting. If they can fix the temperature and high voltage issues. All in all good article
Ah that makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up. I hadn't looked at it that way. Being imperfect sucks.