ATI Crossfire = better FR ???

[scottb613]

All,

On the path to building a new machine - I have another question...

Does ATI crossfire technology offer any real improvement for FS9 or FSX ???

This ties two video cards together to drive a single monitor - correct ???

While I am at it - is DDR3 memory worth the extra expense or - should DDR2 be fine ???

Thanks,
Scott

[noell]

Ati's Crossfire and Nvidia's Sli are competing technologies that boost graphics performance by linking two video cards together to produce a single output.

To take advantage of these technologies, the software being run must be written to support it. FS9 and FSX were not written to support Crossfire or Sli so there will be no performance advantage with such a setup. Therefore, your best option for FS9 and/or FSX is still one high-end video card.


....Noell

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3.8GHz
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EVGA 8800 GTS KO ACS3 640MB OC'd @ 650MHz Core & 1.85GHz Mem (Driver: XG163.76)
Monitors: Samsung 215TW (Primary) & LG L206WTQ (Secondary)
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Antec P180B case

[loki]

No application needs to be written expressly for SLI or Crossfire support as it happens in the driver. There may be ways the developer can tweak the software to better use it, but they don't need to do anything to get the performance boost.

About the only place that SLI and Crossfire are really worth it is when running very high end resolutions, like 1920x1200. It's also usually only worth it when buying two of the top end cards as otherwise you just buy the next card up. In other words, SLI with two 8600GT cards is pointless as it is expensive and a single 8800GT card would be faster.

Also, neither SLI nor Crossfire double the performance, and you usually get something a 70% increase at best. And this is in games that are GPU constrained, which FSX isn't.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archiv...ulti-core.aspx

[scottb613]

Thanks guys - for taking the time...

I am getting pretty excited about building my first machine...


Regards,
Scott