There are a few things to watch out for if you’re thinking about going with a multiple graphics card setup. Compatibility: The Difference Between Crossfire and SLI When multiple graphics cards are trying to communicate, small errors can occur which causes a frame to be displayed for too long, which causes micro stuttering.
When frames are displayed on your screen, you want that frame there for as little time as possible before the next frame comes up. Again, due to your cards having to communicate very quickly with each other, sometimes it can cause issues with your frametimes. If you’re using AMD CrossFire and have graphics cards of two different VRAM capacities, then it will default to the lowest size.įor example: If you have two video cards, one with 8GB of RAM and one with 6GB and they’re both compatible to be used with each other, both cards will act as if they have 6GB instead of 8 and 6, respectively.Īnother common issue is microstuttering. In actuality, they mirror the data in the buffer. When you’re using multiple video cards, they have to communicate with each other very quickly.Ī common misconception is that you will get double video RAM with double cards. This is where those certain restrictions come in. You can find AMD’s list of compatible games here, and Nvidia’s list here. Some games have even been known to lose performance when using multiple graphics cards, but there are still plenty of games that support multi GPU. This means a lot of games that aren’t AAA games may never be able to use the extra power although, AAA games are the ones most likely to need the extra power to begin with. The audience size for multiple GPU usage is pretty small compared to those who only use a single graphics card. But this is not easily done and takes a lot of time time that many developers don’t have or would rather spend on something everyone will utilize, like fixing bugs.
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In fact, the game developers have to spend extra time coding program profiles into their software to tell them how to utilize the extra graphics cards. While GPU software can enable multiple graphics card use during games, it doesn’t mean that they’re optimized for it.
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Unfortunately, not every game will net you those huge PC Master Race performance gains. Since you are providing the system with more rendering power it only makes sense. Using multiple graphics cards can net you a significant increase in your overall gaming performance. But what about an increase in performance overall? What Are The Gains?Īs we talked about before, twice the video card doesn’t necessarily mean twice the power. One card will render odd numbered frames, and one card will render the even numbered frames. Just like SFR, Alternate frame rendering is basically self explanatory.
This essentially lets the two cards act as one to pool their power together. One card takes the top half of the frame, and the other card takes the bottom half of the frame. Split frame rendering is exactly what it sounds like, whenever a frame needs to be rendered, each graphics card will take half of a frame and render them separately. When thinking about using multiple graphics cards for gaming, you might imagine both cards working as one, pooling their resources and effectively giving you double the power.īy using SFR and AFR they each work on a portion of the workload, but you don’t really gain double the power by using two cards. Anyway, Nvidia has decided to stop supporting three-way and four-way SLI on the GTX 10 GPU models, so it’s likely they’re trying to phase that out.īoth brands use the same methods to utilize GPUs for gaming: Split Frame Rendering (SFR), and Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR). The laws of diminishing returns already rears its ugly head with two graphics cards, so once you get past dual cards it really comes into play. While you can use three or even four cards at once, I’ll specifically be talking about dual graphics card use, which is when you use exactly 2 graphics cards. While AMD and Nvidia both have solutions to using multiple graphics cards at once, they both come with certain conditions in order to use them. There are two ways to go about adding multiple graphics cards to your computer: AMD CrossFire or Nvidia SLI. Using multiple video cards to increase performance is possible, but there are also some restrictions. The long answer though is no, you can’t just instantly get twice the power with twice the video cards. Anyone who has wanted to get more power out of their computer has undoubtedly asked,“ Can I just slap an extra video card onto my motherboard and get twice the power instead of just buying a more expensive, larger upgrade?”
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