Benchmarks

If you haven’t had the chance to check out any of our SLI or Crossfire coverage in the past, you might not know it but for the most part, I let the numbers speak for themselves and just touch on any potential issues. This is a little different from our normal video card reviews, but typically people looking for Crossfire/SLI performance just want the numbers.

In the past, I only included the performance numbers for the games tested that actually supported Crossfire while listing off the games we ran into that didn’t see a boost or even saw a drop in performance. This time around I’m including all of the numbers but will be splitting them up. First, here are all of the games tested that saw a performance improvement when running in Crossfire. The 3Dmark tests have been tuned well for Crossfire and show a large jump putting two 480’s up over the GTX 1080 but all of the games tested didn’t show the same gap. For the most part, the games that support Crossfire show a little under an FPS double but this was still less than the GTX 1080.

One of the big downsides to running multiple cards in Crossfire or SLI is the lack of support in a lot of games. AMD doesn’t provide a list at all of the games that do have support and from what I can see Nvidia seems to have significantly higher number of games that support SLI but without a list, I can’t be sure. That said of all of the games in our benchmark suite, 7 supported Crossfire and 5 don’t. There were also 4 synthetic benchmarks with support and 1 that didn’t. Below are all of the results with no support and as you can see, typically when you don’t have support you can expect a little less performance than running just one card.