onethreehill
02-23-2009, 05:39 AM
Graphics is infinitely parallel. There is always more work that can be done, and the work can be broken up into millions of completely independent operations. This is very different than most tasks we see done on the CPU that don't scale quite as easily with the number of cores. While we might see small improvements by adding another CPU, we can see nearly double the performance by doubling the number of processors in a graphics card (as long as there are no other bottlenecks anyway). This fact is why AMD and NVIDIA have invested so much money into their respective multiGPU solutions (CrossFire and SLI respectively).
MultiGPU solutions have been around for a few years now, and while we frequently include single card multiGPU solutions in our reviews, we only occasionally take an in depth look at multiGPU technology. Some time has passed since the last time we studied the issue, and now that we've fully broken in our Core i7 system, 64-bit Vista, and recent graphics drivers, it's time to get to it.
Over the past few weeks we've been benchmarking and analyzing lots of numbers. We've looked at single, two, three and four GPU systems across multiple games and resolutions. The configurations we chose to look at are current generation high-ish end hardware capable of operation in 3-way and 4-way configurations. Because of the sheer volume of data we collected, we've decided to break up our analysis into multiple articles.
This first article (the one you're reading right now) will cover single and dual GPU configurations (including single card multiGPU hardware). The next article will add 3-way solutions along with comparisons back to single and dual GPU setups. The final article will add in 4-way performance analysis and compare it back to the single, dual and 3-way data. Splitting up the analysis this way will allow us to dive deep into each type of configuration individually without spreading the content too thin. We can keep focus on a specific aspect of multiGPU performance and scaling while still making all the relevant comparisons...........
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3517
MultiGPU solutions have been around for a few years now, and while we frequently include single card multiGPU solutions in our reviews, we only occasionally take an in depth look at multiGPU technology. Some time has passed since the last time we studied the issue, and now that we've fully broken in our Core i7 system, 64-bit Vista, and recent graphics drivers, it's time to get to it.
Over the past few weeks we've been benchmarking and analyzing lots of numbers. We've looked at single, two, three and four GPU systems across multiple games and resolutions. The configurations we chose to look at are current generation high-ish end hardware capable of operation in 3-way and 4-way configurations. Because of the sheer volume of data we collected, we've decided to break up our analysis into multiple articles.
This first article (the one you're reading right now) will cover single and dual GPU configurations (including single card multiGPU hardware). The next article will add 3-way solutions along with comparisons back to single and dual GPU setups. The final article will add in 4-way performance analysis and compare it back to the single, dual and 3-way data. Splitting up the analysis this way will allow us to dive deep into each type of configuration individually without spreading the content too thin. We can keep focus on a specific aspect of multiGPU performance and scaling while still making all the relevant comparisons...........
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3517