Should I add Crossfire to my single HD6850

Short answer is no.

I remember reading about all the great performance you would get by buying a hd 5770 CF setup instead of a single hd5870. Cheaper, faster etc. etc.

It was a mess. I hated the stuttering and still measuring very high fps in benchmarks. Also hated the lack of CF support in some games. I sold them off pretty quickly and was very pleased to get a single hd5870 later on. It was MUCH nicer to game on, even at a little less fps.

Now I don't know about later cards but I swore never to run dual setups EVER again. One exception made later: My V2 sli 😎 (but that simply works great).

V2 sli is a beast on its own but simply because is more up to the drivers to support it than for games i think
most crossfire/sli setups, while performing better than single card, are less compatible and the game has to support it specifically, making them more troublesome
i will avoid crossfire or sli at all costs, since there are far better, newer and more capable cards for relatively cheap
these multi gpu configurations were a great deal when there were no better cards or a newer card was costly, but nothing else.

meljor wrote:

I remember reading about all the great performance you would get by buying a hd 5770 CF setup instead of a single hd5870. Cheaper, faster etc. etc.

It was a mess. I hated the stuttering and still measuring very high fps in benchmarks. Also hated the lack of CF support in some games. I sold them off pretty quickly and was very pleased to get a single hd5870 later on. It was MUCH nicer to game on, even at a little less fps.

Now I don't know about later cards but I swore never to run dual setups EVER again. One exception made later: My V2 sli 😎 (but that simply works great).

They fixed the stuttering in later drivers.

I still have a setup with dual HD6870 cards. Really good compared to a single 6870, but a single HD7970 / R9 280X is faster and also has 3 times the RAM.

I ran dual 7970s until I got an R9 390 which is just as fast as dual 7970s.

Single, faster card is going to give a better experience overall, but dual cards can be just fine if you don't want to / can't spend money on a single, better card.

I ran cf 5770s as well and once the bugs were worked out it was the best multi gpu setup I've seen to date. Ran that for a good 5 years.

On topic, for the best bang for the buck I'd sell that 6850 and buy a used 7950 or best GCN or newer era card I could budget. 7950 still handles most any modern game at 1080p very well.

6850 is going to suffer from the slow memory and lack of vram, cf wont help that.

As a rule, CF or SLI is only interesting if you can't install or afford a single, higher performance GPU - i.e. if you're already running the single fastest GPU available for your platform and it still isn't fast enough. Below that, upgrading the single GPU will almost always give you better performance across the board without any of the drawbacks associated with multi-GPU (bad support in all its various incarnations, huge peak power draw, double the noise etc).

Given you can easily get *much* faster single GPUs than the HD6850, unless you're trying to be studiously period-correct, I'd just go for a faster GPU.

OK guys thanks for the advice as always.

Seems I can get a used 7950 for about £80 and as was suggested then sell the 6850 and probably end up costing me less than £50 in total once i sold that. So not much difference than the £40 for crossfire 6850s.

Used 7970 look to be about £100. Is there a lot of difference between the 7950 and 7970?

I found a used R9 390 8Gb for £120, but mostly seem to be selling for about £140. Getting more expensive but maybe worth the extra, if I sell my 6850 at the going rate then would end up costing me about £100

HAving said that, as I mentioned on the opening thread Crysis Warhead is playing fine on my intel i7/6850/Windows 10 rig anyway as far as I can tell, not having anything really to compare it with. I don't curently own any games more demanding than that one, and asked for it in my xmas stocking as much to see how my fastest rig would handle a more demanding game as for any other reason - though I must admit after a day trying it it does seem extraordinarily good fun to play!

Games i am mostly playing right now is working my way through the whole Tombraider series, currently nearly finish TR2 which are playing well on my little slimline Pentium 4 / Radion 9600 Pro - Win XP rig, and also been playing the original Half Life as I have the CD but never played more than the first level back in the day. Half Life is running great on my Core 2 Duo / X1800 / Windows XP Rig by the way.

It would be interesting to see what frame rate Crysis is running on my PC - I'm off to google on how to measure that right now 😀

PS an old friend called me to let me know he is clearing his garage out and still has two old PCs I sold him back in the 90s. He was gonna take them to the dump but asked if i would like them. So I said 'oh go on then.... 😀' One is a 486 based PC so he says (could be my old 486DX50 which a I remember were rare back in the day) and the other one is a full height tower on caster wheels that has a multichanger CDROM. I vaguely remember the rig with the multichanger CDROM, I was using it to play Phantasmagoria I think back in the day. That could be the one with the Voodoo 2 in it, there may have been 2x Voodoo 2 SLI, can't quite remember for sure, i owned a computer shop back then and had a lot of different hardware myself so would have taken a couple of V2s home to play with but don't remember if I kept them both and memory doesn't improve with age 🤣. Will post when i find out exactly what I got.

Downloaded FRAPS and tried that. Crysis Warhead running about, on average, 50FPS at 1920x1080 with AA=2 but sometimes dropping to low 40s FPS.

At 1024x768 running at 60-80FPS with no AA and a bit lower 48-60FPS wih AA=2

To be honest it looks good to my eyes even at the higher resolution and 40-50FPS hmmm