Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and today we're doing an SLI test using two 970 s against a single 980ti to see what is the best value because they're about the same amount of spend you can spend 300 to 350 ish on each 970 putting you at about the $700 range or you can spend in the 650 to $700 range on a single 980ti in our tests we also included a single 980 and a single r9 390x just to give us some perspective because those put you at the $420 range for the 305 hundred range for the 989 ti but what we're really looking at here is the two 970 s and sli versus the single at 980 TI so here's the thing with sli in the past and this is true of crossfire as well the multi card configurations have sometimes proven to be difficult to work with so in some scenarios some games some driver sets SLI and crossfire scaling is so bad that it is sometimes almost better to disable one card and run just a single device and obviously that that's kind of sucks to do because then you're just throwing out half of your graphics processing configuration out the window with SLI and DirectX 11 which is everything we tested today you generally get an alternate frame rendering environment and you can't stack the vram so it's effectively using the second card as an additional processing engine and the vram is ignored for all of the testing methodology check the link in the description below that is the full article it contains a lot more depth and will explain how we tested these games and what pitfalls we may have encountered or may have had to avoid in the testing of these games given specific parameters and graphics settings and things like that in Metro last light the 980ti is favored and wins by four point seven eight percent over the nine 70s an SLI making it the better Buy and definitely be more simple route to go in terms of configuration and that's at 1080p looking at fall for at 1080p as well the 980ti is again favored over the dual nine 70s and that is a five point four eight percent advantage in the average FPS department but there's some points to talk about with the one percent in 0.1 percent lows which we'll get into momentarily after running through these charts shadow of mordor at 1080p sees a favor or an advantage for the nine 70s in SLI but the advantage is so small at 1080p that it is effectively an observable it's a one point eight seven percent difference that is measurable in testing that is outside of our margin of error but as a user you will not notice that difference at 4k resolution there is actually much more noticeable difference it's nine point eight eight percent of the frame rates much lower as well so again sort of hard to notice but 59 verse 53 ish fps does actually give you some advantage in gameplay with the witcher 3 at the lower resolution of the two tested the 970 is in sli are objectively superior it's the 980 eye and there is a noticeable difference the 970 SLI configuration performs thirty point zero seven percent better than a single 980ti and that is definitely noticeable and makes the nine seventies in sli a better value than the same price single card configuration at the highest resolution we tested looking at that chart now the witcher 3 shows a 19 point seven percent advantage for the nine 70s and hassle i'm making it interesting because it actually scales differently than the other games we tested where you'll see sli scaling improve as the resolution improves over the 980 i in the witcher 3 that is not the case and then two 970 s actually lose some ground but still remain about twenty percent ahead of the single 980ti black ops three is a bit different title it is highly performant very optimized and runs well on most video cards and this game favors the 970 s an SLI by seventeen point two three percent at fourteen forty and ten point one four percent at 4k assassin's creed syndicate is brand new and syndicate when it launched had terrible sli scaling it was actually basically non-existent so at game launch you were better off just disabling one of your cards because they were big hits to 1% and 0.1% low frame times and that was a result of the way AFR works and sometimes you'll get kind of a micro stutter with SLI so that happened when the game was brand new but has since been resolved through driver updates and optimizations so now looking at the game with the newest drivers the performance is actually much improved but the 980ti is still favored by eight point two eight percent so again you're better off here with a single card configuration and that now makes three points the nine ATI and two points for the nine 70s in SLI Just Cause 3 is a game where there is absolutely no value to SLI because there is ZERO scaling for the most part very little scale in any way and the 980ti actually wins out by twenty six point eight nine percent so similar to The Witcher 3 the nine ATI is objectively superior The Witcher 3 of course the 970 is an SLI or superior but there's a bit of trading back and forth here with Grand Theft Auto the 970 s an SLI have an eleven point five three percent advantage and that is improved again over the scaling of the game when it first came out so that was a driver improvement and we can draw a straight line here that shows the gains that nvidia has made in their drivers with sli as the as time goes on as drivers iterate so day one launch drivers generally are not great for the support of SLI in the past year as we've seen in testing we've done all these videos now we're gonna look at SLI scaling that is the Delta the percentage difference or Delta in performance between a single 970 SSC and two 970 s one being the SSC the other being the hybrid 1080p scaling in Metro last light the dual 970 configuration is twenty six point two six percent advantaged at 1080p over a single 970 a pretty big gain but not super impressive especially considering the ninety eighty I was the better card for this game and it is thirty eight point nine three percent advantage at 1440p and forty three point two zero advantage that 4k fallout 4 at 1080p scaling is 31 point 1 2 percent favored for the SLI configuration over a single 970 so again a major improvement shadow of mordor 46.1 4% at 1080p so is it worth doing 970 is an SLI as opposed to a single 980ti depends on where you're coming from if you already own one 970 then it is clear that in some of these games four of them that we tested the to nine seventies are actually better than a single 980ti and as someone who already owns half of what you need the value isn't bad because you've already spent 300 350 whatever it is hopefully a while ago so that money's gone ahead now you can buy another card and in some cases improve your performance by 50% and GTA we saw 60 percent performance increase at 4k and in black ops 3 57 point eight nine percent at 4k to the point where it's actually very playable at 4k using nine 70s so depending on where you're coming from if you already own half of the configuration it may be worth doing 970 s an SLI as a new buyer as someone building a new system today then I would generally recommend a single 980ti unless you are very specifically playing one of these games that had a heavy performance advantage over the single 980ti and when I say heavy I mean more than the one point eight seven percent in shadow of mordor five point four eight percent in other games so the 90 is did better in Metro last light single card fallout four single card and two more games Assassin's Creed syndicate single 980ti Just Cause 3 single 980ti the United 70s had a massive advantage in The Witcher 3 which is really the only title that is showing the huge advantage we saw and then in black ops 3 where it was it was big enough performance gain at 1440 to put you close to 144 Hertz if you're trying to get that really fast and fluid FPS gameplay experience then the SLI configuration is effectively required unless you're running a lower resolution like 1080p in which case you can get with a single card if you overclocked it a bit so in our testing there were four points for the 970 s in SLI and four points for the 980ti single card in terms of the head-to-head they were tied with each other depending on what game you looked at but the difference of those points the value of those points depends on the game the nighti I was always a minimum when it was a head of 5 percent against the 970 s an SLI 9 so DS an S law I got as high as 30% ahead in The Witcher 3 here's what I would do if I own half the configuration already I would do a 970 SLI setup if I really wanted to push into 1440p and in some games 4k playability now you're still not gonna be playing 4k with most games even with 970 and SLI because it's just it's limited in a lot of ways vram is definitely one of those if I'm if I own nothing nope no card no build and I'm building today tomorrow sometime soon then the single device is the route I would go and that is for a few reasons one on day one with game launches there is better support for single cards they're the same price or there abouts anyway and the night II I did have a 4.2 4.3 Zolt against the 970 s in SLI they were head-to-head exactly with some of these games I would also choose a single card configuration because the 1% and 0.1% lows were advantaged to the 980 I almost every single test that's something that's not shown in just the Delta scaling values every single test the night II I had better 1% and 0.1% lows as compared to its average FPS output and that is what will affect your gaming fluidity and how smooth the framerate output looks as a user what the apparent smoothness is despite the average FPS so for those reasons I would give an IAT I route if building a new system if you're doing an SLI setup because you already own one card 970 is an SLI aren't bad the scaling is actually very good these days for the games that it does get supported by Just Cause 3 excluded here in these tests and originally Assassin's Creed syndicate though now it works better with SLI than it used to with its 33% scaling so that is all for this test I hope you liked the format please hit the patreon link and the put in the postal video check the article in the description below for more information and if you want to learn about that 390x and its performance in these tests check out that article we'll do another video on am the devices specifically crossfire things like that in the near future thank you for watching I'll see you all next time