Gadgetory

how's it going guys this is just a quick little follow-up to a previous video I did where I benchmarked two GTX 670 s in two-way SLI today however I'm going to be benchmarking two Radeon HD 7870 s in crossfire X and this is a sapphire card I actually did an unboxing of this not too long ago you can check that out if you haven't already after you've watched this video of course but in no way shape or form am i comparing the 7870 to the GTX 670 because they're in totally different tiers right did you take with the GTX 670 being a much more expensive high-end top-performing card compared to the 7870 but what I am comparing or at least taking a look at today is the difference in scaling between Nvidia cards and AMD cards when put in SLI or crossfire X and put to the test with the given games that I have tested today as well as some synthetic benchmarks so without further ado why don't we take a look at the hardware that I'm using so I'm still rocking the 2600 K overclocked at 4400 megahertz I still have the Z 68 chipset and motherboard I do promise guys that I'm going to try my very hardest to upgrade to a PCI gen3 motherboard in the future but until then you can see the other specs there I did update to the latest 13.2 beta 5 catalyst drivers and the video card specs there on the right 1050 megahertz core clock it is a factory overclocked out-of-the-box card so keep that in mind and yeah I think that's pretty much it all tests were run at 1920 by 1080 so starting with Skyrim and once again just like the 2-way SLI video that I did I'm gonna go from least performance to most performance so starting with the worst performance as far as we saw in scaling wise we had skyrim at 3.4 percent and take a look just underneath that you can see it's 11.8% scaling with sli so if you notice FXAA was turned off so FX is naturally an nvidia technology so I figure like if I would have turned FX a a on I wonder if the scaling would have been even worse because you know maybe this AMD card isn't really optimized for FX a as much as an nvidia card would be so let's be interesting I should take a look at that and rerun some tests but as you can see there SLI definitely performs quite a bit better with Skyrim taking a look at Borderlands 2 we can see 4.6% still not that great compared to SLI with 15.1% scaling and once again we had fxaa turned on this time so that could be a reason why I took a performance hit as well as physics so physics is a very toted feature of Borderlands 2 and I had that set to high so once again if I would have set that to medium or even low I'm pretty sure the scaling performance would have been higher but not the case here I wanted to use all the same settings I did for the two-way SLI video so that's why they are set to the way they are moving on to Far Cry 3 we definitely saw a huge jump here 91.5% and scaling and this actually beat out the SLI configuration which only had 72.3% performance increase and I feel like a huge reason behind this is because AMD was actually sponsoring far cry 3 this is one of the games that they were working side by side with the developers and when one of the manufacturers when either AMD or Nvidia works with the game developer they're often pouring a lot of money into driver development and they're also giving those developers all of their technology to work with so generally those games from those developers tend to perform better with hardware from that particular manufacturer that was sponsoring that so here obviously you can see it basically blew SLI out of the water moving on to hitman absolution once again just incredibly even more southern Far Cry 3 95.1% scaling as opposed to 33.3% with sli once again this is an AMD back to game if any you guys have noticed any of the gaming bundles or gaming promotions that AMD has been going on hitman absolution and Far Cry 3 have both been on there so even with FXAA turned on and and all that good stuff we still saw just like a massive increase so if hitman absolution is the only game you ever play it's probably worth it to get an AMD card and even more so get two of them and crossfire X that because damn that's pretty damn good performance right there battlefield 3 once again we saw a improvement over the SLI configuration with the GTX 670 s not by as much mind to you as hitman or Far Cry 3 but still a significant amount 96.3% scaling as opposed to eighty seven point five percent with SLI which still isn't bad and that is basically the top performer as far as scaling goes with the real world gaming benchmarks moving on to these synthetic benchmarks at our lowest point we had Metro 2033 at fifty two point nine percent and I don't know if the synthetic benchmarks matter as much to you guys I'm personally I'm kind of on the fence about synthetic benchmarks I really like them because they're so consistent every time you're gonna get the exact same run run through every time you run the program but does it really tell you anything about how it's gonna perform in a real-world situation what do you guys think just leave a comment in the section below let me know is it worth my time for you guys for me to do synthetic benchmarks or do you just want to see the real world gaming stuff because I'm really not sure but here you can see sli really did outperform crossfire X in this case with 80.6% and moving on to 3d mark this is a new one that I have just added this is the new 3d mark from future mark guys and it's a pretty cool test I ran it I ran the fire strike demo which is basically for DirectX 11 based hardware and as you can see here I didn't do it in the last video for the 2-way SLI so I had no results to compare it to but it's still pretty interesting nonetheless so the main score the main score is kind of like a compilation of a physics score and graphics score and I kind of wanted to more focus on the graphics score on this slide just because it's really just testing the GPU alone as opposed to the overall score at all it also faster factors some physics in there which is basically a lot of parallel simulations that are being run on your CPU so here you can see 95.1% scaling for the graphics score for the regular fire strike demo and the for fire strike extreme which is basically just a more intensive run I got ninety two point one percent scale and the max temperatures are there listed for you in red moving on to a VP you can see here pretty much the closest I could find SLI and CrossFireX compared to each other so ninety six point zero to ninety five point one virtually the same I'd say it's a very negligible difference there and you can see it's not really clearly optimized for either one maybe a little bit in favor of crossfire X and lastly this is pretty awesome Heaven 3.0 we saw a hundred and one point two percent in scaling performance with crossfire X as opposed to the eighty seven point eight two percent with SLI so I was pretty blown away that I actually achieved over a hundred percent increase in performance with this test so that was pretty cool alright guys so after taking a look at the results what does it all mean right what does it come down to do you get an AMD card or do you get Nvidia card do you go for crossfire X or SLI and I know you guys hate hearing this because I know you probably google this question a million times and searches on YouTube but it really does boil down to personal preference yes I said it I know crucify me it's horrible but it's true you know because I mean it depends on your desired functionality at the end of the day what do you want out of your gaming experience do you care about things like physics or fxaa do you mind if those things are turned off or disabled in your game do you care about achieving higher frame rates if there's no noticeable change in gameplay experience you know do you tend to find yourself playing games that are more generally supported by Nvidia or AMD these are all questions that need to be answered before you can make up your mind and decide which video card or which manufacturer is right for you so at the end of the day hopefully you guys enjoyed this video and enjoyed the content that I'm putting out if you enjoyed it please subscribe to the channel and thank you all for watching so until next time I'll see you guys in the next video