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1. #Draw a cost curve for starcraft ii wings of liberty drivers#
2. #Draw a cost curve for starcraft ii wings of liberty driver#

#Draw a cost curve for starcraft ii wings of liberty driver#

Those profiles can be updated more quickly and frequently than its monthly Catalyst driver drops, if needed. Mission accomplished! AMD hasn’t always been as vigilant about providing CrossFire support for brand-new games prior to their release, but it has recently ratcheted up its efforts by breaking out CrossFire application profiles into a separate download.

#Draw a cost curve for starcraft ii wings of liberty drivers#

These days, Nvidia often adds support for new games to its drivers weeks before the game itself ships to consumers.ĪMD’s answer to SLI was originally named CrossFire, but it was later updated to “CrossFireX” in order to confuse people like me. Since then, Nvidia has expended considerable effort by working with game developers to ensure smooth compatibility and solid performance scaling for SLI configurations. Nvidia re-christened the term “scalable link interconnect,” so named for the bridge connection between two cards, and turned SLI into a feature of multiple generations of GeForces.

Those letters originally stood for “scanline interleave” back in the day, which was how 3dfx Voodoo chips divvied up the work between them. Nvidia arguably kicked off the modern era of multi-GPU goodness by resurrecting the letters “SLI”, which it saw sewn into a jacket it took off the corpse of graphics chip pioneer 3dfx. (Yeah, the whole PCs versus next-gen consoles hardware debate kinda ended around that time.) The green team hasn’t yet introduced a dual-GPU video card in the current generation, but it has a long history of such products stretching from the GeForce GTX 295 back to the GeForce 7950 GX2, which essentially doubled up on PlayStation 3-class GPUs way back in 2006. A duo of GeForce GTX 480s is nothing to sneeze at—the mist would instantly vaporize due to the heat of hundreds of watts being dissipated. Nvidia’s SLI tops out at three GPUs and is limited to fewer, more expensive cards, but then Nvidia is still making much larger chips. Multiple Radeon cards can gang up via CrossFireX technology into teams of two, three, or four GPUs, as well. Heck, AMD has replaced its largest graphics processor with a multi-chip solution its high-end graphics card is the Radeon HD 5970, prodigiously powered by dual GPUs. These schemes can have their drawbacks, when for one reason or another performance doesn’t scale well, but both of the major graphics players are very strongly committed to multi-GPU technology. The very parallelizable nature of graphics as a computing problem means two GPUs have the potential to deliver nearly twice the speed of a single chip a pretty high percentage of the time. Multi-GPU schemes have been around for quite a while now, simply because they’re an effective way to achieve higher performance. Could it be that doubling down on mid-range graphics cards is a better path to gaming enjoyment? How does, well, nearly everything else perform in single and multi-GPU configs? Let’s see what we can find out. With this and many other questions in mind, we fired up the test rigs in Damage Labs and set to work, testing a ridiculous 23 different configurations of one, two, and, yes, three graphics cards against one another for performance, power draw, noise, and value. In fact, at around 200 bucks, the GTX 460 is a good enough value to raise an intriguing question: Is there any reason to plunk down the cash for an expensive high-end graphics card when two of these can be had for less?

The latest GPUs support DirectX 11’s secret blend of herbs and spices, and the recently introduced GeForce GTX 460 has set a new standard for price and performance among them. (Yes, I’m doing this.) Happily, doubling down on a good graphics card can be much tastier than anything the Colonel has managed to serve in the past 15 years, and thermal grease isn’t nearly as nasty as the stuff soaking through the bottom of that red-and-white cardboard bucket. If there’s one thing I enjoy as much as dining on cooked meats, it’s consuming the eye candy produced by a quality GPU. Still, I had to give it a shot, because the concept held such promise for meat-based confections. Eating it mostly involved a lot of chewing and thinking about my health, which got tiresome. Sadly, the Colonel’s new sandwich wasn’t exactly the rewarding explosion of bacon-flavored goodness for which I’d hoped. As I learned from a trip to KFC this summer, doubling down can have its risks and its rewards.