Found this nice little review on video cards over at Tomshardware. Thought some of you would find it interesting, it touches on Nvidia and AMD cards in single and SLI/Crossfire mode. Mentions a few issues as well.
I'll quote a couple of the issues the reviewer found first, in case some of you are experiencing them:
AMD Cards:
Its a fairly long article, check it out over there. All info was found at www.tomshardware.com
I'll quote a couple of the issues the reviewer found first, in case some of you are experiencing them:
About Nvidia Tomshardware wrote:
These are our largest Nvidia-based charts, including 11 different cards at three resolutions. Note that the GeForce GTX 400- and 500-series cards are DirectX 11-capable, and the 200-series boards are limited to DirectX 10. This is an important distinction because, even though the 200s throw up some reasonable performance numbers (especially the GTX 295), they’re not doing as much work. The game automatically dials Terrain Quality down from High to Low, yielding some pretty nasty artifacts as shadows interact with the environment.
Hopefully Nvidia can fix this in its drivers. For now, those older Nvidia cards don't do Battlefield 3 any favors...
Nvidia Cards:About AMD Tomshardware wrote:
I was a little surprised to encounter so many problems getting AMD-based multi-GPU configurations working.
At first, the Radeon HD 6990 wouldn’t run at all with the Catalyst 11.10 Preview 3 driver installed, locking up before I could complete any benchmark run (and on the only two boards in my collection). The Radeon HD 5970 worked, but dropped a GPU after every resolution change, requiring a game restart. A subsequent install cratered the 5970 altogether, preventing us from generating anti-aliasing scores with it. None of our two-board setups functioned at all.
Then, I spent a full day trying to drum up answers. Replacing cards, power supplies, switching motherboard slots, swapping SSDs, reformatting SSDs, installing beta Application Profiles…none of it helped. On a whim, I pulled the 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) Crucial DDR3-1333 memory kit I used for my Bulldozer review and replaced it with 8 GB of G.Skill modules. Suddenly, I could run benchmarks. They’d still crash when I changed resolutions. But I could generate results, at least.
I asked AMD what interaction CrossFire had with system memory that wasn't part of a single-card config and would cause a system memory compatibility problem, but didn't get an answer. The company did, however, confirm that it's seeing the same CrossFire-based issues in its own lab.
AMD Cards:
Its a fairly long article, check it out over there. All info was found at www.tomshardware.com
