Gadgetory

so I could just be a total butt-head and say well I made a video about in videos SLI so go watch that this is the same except your cards from AMD we call it crossfire but that would be lazy and we strive for maximum professional istic ality around here and truthfully it's not that simple anyway there are some critical differences between SLI and crossfire that I believe demonstrate a fundamental difference in philosophy between AMD and NVIDIA but first the basics both technologies are pretty much a way to utilize more than one graphics card working in tandem in your PC to achieve next-gen class performance that wouldn't otherwise be available with the current technology due to power thermal or other limitations think of it kind of like if you could buy two Xbox ones bolt them together and actually run your games at 1080p up burn anyway they both work with anywhere from two to three or even four compatible cards in one system and perform their best at high resolutions with graphically demanding games they also both dramatically increase the power consumption and heat output of your computer system without having a proportional impact on the performance you'll get in games in fact another thing they share in common is that if the game doesn't have a profile implemented they may not improve performance at all but with that said if you're looking for an experience that simply isn't available today by other means like butter smooth 4k or 1080p surround gaming then you're likely one of the folks that the solution was designed for all right so a moment ago I mentioned compatible cards this is differentiation point number one for AMD well NVIDIA allows mix and matching of vendors and clock speeds you can SLI an EVGA reference card with an asus overclocked one they require you to use exactly the same graphics processor with the same memory configuration AMD on the other hand has pretty loosey-goosey you can mix vendors clock speeds Ram amounts and even the graphics processor as long as the cards are within the same arc textual family so for example a 79-73 gig card can cross fire with a 7950 with three gig or even an r9 280x with six gigs of ram because they're all based on that same GPU differentiation point number two for AMD is cost nvidia requires sli certification for your cards to recognize your system as compatible and activate their wonder-twin powers for that in-video requires the qualifying PCI Express slots to run at 8 X minimum even though these days a 4 X PCIe gen3 slot is plenty for pretty much any graphics card and they require the board manufacturer to pay a licensing fee you can find AMD crossfire compatibility on product pages for like business class boards basically anything goes as long as it's got a couple of PCI Express 16x physical slots differentiation point number 3 is something that's actually still a work-in-progress for AMD since the beginning of dual GPU solutions with voodoo sli there's been some kind of connector attaching the cards with AMD r9 290 series cards and presumably future ones as well all communication between the cards is done over the PCI Express bus it's a higher bandwidth cleaner-looking solution to the problem of how these cards can sync data with each other at high speed when they're working together finally differentiation point number 4 is that AMD allows their cards their low-end cards to run in crossfire with the onboard graphics of their AP use which are CPUs that have strong onboard graphics components although the solution still needs some work to be something that I'd really recommend and I guess that's it I guess that's the philosophical difference between AMD and NVIDIA Nvidia locks things down which gives them tighter control over the consistency of the users experience but AMD offers more flexibility and choice even if some of these options aren't the best thing ever at least you can pick them speaking of things that aren't the best thing ever searching for 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in the video description thanks for watching guys and just so you know I was actually kind of serious at the beginning there the SLI video I mentioned at the very start of this one has some great information about dual GPU configurations in general and this one was more meant to augment that one with a focus on the key differences for AMD users anyway like and share this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have something to say to me or the rest of the fastest possible team and as always don't forget to subscribe to tech cookie for more videos just like this one or slightly different we can change if that's what you need