alienware
Banned
The big Quadfire experiment
For years now I have sat and gazed lovingly at computers with either four graphics cards in them or two dual GPU graphics cards in them. I have been envious, however I have always been incredibly suspicious. Everywhere I look I have seen people defend their systems saying how fantastic and fast they are, yet on paper and in reviews it seems to state the contrary. Are these owners doing something that reviewers and the like are not?
Well, today we are going to find out.
If ever I was under the mistaken and most foolish impression that I might be able to part the red sea and perform some miracles this would have been it. There was a very thick air of caution however, I hardly spent anything to find out. What do I mean by that? well, us PC owners are among the most intelligent on the planet (especially those that know software as well as plugging things in). However, we can also be the thickest idiots on the planet at the same time. See, we all know best and we all know better than any one else. For most of us the hardware we have is better than any one elses, and our Radeons and Geforces are better than ones you can go and buy from the shop. Ours are special and personal to us. This can lead us into trouble sometimes, as sometimes we plainly ignore the writing on the wall and find out the hard way that it may have been a better idea to listen. However, with that said sometimes I feel you can truly only learn from your mistakes.
For today's tests we are using Quadfire. With Physx. Here is a pic of the test system used for these experiments.
AMD Phenom 9950 stock.
3gb DDR2 800 (2x512mb+2x1gb)
Asus M3A32-MVP WIFI motherboard (4x 16x PCIE full speed lanes)
2 Radeon 3870x2 1gb cards (512mb per GPU)
BFG Ageia Physx PPU PCI
You see, right away it looks impressive. Those cards are large, masculine and guzzle down power. They are the muscle car of graphics cards and every man yearns to own a muscle car. So for looks alone Quadfire is a win. Sadly in computers (like in cars) it's what's on the inside that counts, and these muscle cars ain't no sleepers.
Today's test system comprises of a very cheap pile of parts. I spent £130 in order to get it all together and run Quadfire which isn't very much. So, without further ado let's get onto the goody shall we?
When I read about Quadfire I usually came up with the same comments - "Get it if you want to sit in the corner and pleasure yourself with 3Dmark scores" . I would imagine then that they do OK in 3Dmark?
Here is the results when running a single card.
Which TBH is a very respectable score for a £50 videocard. Moving on then, here is the score from both cards (Quadfire) with the Physx PPU helping along.
Very good eh? About an 80% increase. Now this I had read about, so was kind of expecting. I was slightly chuffed with this, given that it isn't a million miles away from my 5770s in Crossfire. However, the worst was to come. The first thing I did was load up Crysis. Now Crysis is
Which again is a very respectable result for a card knocking on three years old. Infact, it beats the crap out of a Geforce 8800 Ultra. Very impressive indeed. By now I was getting excited, thinking that maybe the second card would whack a homer out of the park and I would be celebrating with a nice ice cold Bud. Sadly it wasn't to be...
As you can see performance has literally fallen apart. I spent hours trying again, trying different configs and everything else but it just made no difference at all. I was still in denial when I went looking for CFG hacks and when I found one that apparently made it see four GPUs I could hardly contain myself. But, sadly, even with the hack nothing changed. It was also as erratic as a schizophrenic patient on steroids. Every time I ran the benchmark I got completely different results. The problem was not just the poor performance but the absolutely abysmal stuttering. It made the game (and I did try it, still in denial believing that it was the benchmark tool) utterly unplayable.
None of this would matter to me if this setup could eat Fallout 3. I hate Crysis any way.
So I ran Fallout 3. A mixture of high and ultra settings. HDR, Bloom, 4xFSAA and 15xaniso.
And now you can see why I like my 3870x2. It cost a meagre fifty pounds and can do that to my favourite game of all time. Again, beginning to drool I ran the same test on Quadfire.
No, I have not posted the same picture. Take note of the Quadfire logo on the benchmark. Yup, I scored exactly the same results.
But Alien, that's not so bad, at least it wasn't worse like with Crysis !
No no, it was worse. What you can't see from those results is the stuttering pile of arse it became. It was so bad that I had to disable Quadfire just to get my hour in last night. Again, a total mess and something I was beginning to expect.
Last but not least it was time for Batman Arkham Asylum. Once again I was expecting terrible scaling. Let's see what I got shall we?
Everything maxed, no Physx, no AA, one card.
And then with Quadfire enabled. Now this time I had to pinch myself to actually believe this. It was now 2am and I was groggy, sweaty (my god these things get HOT) and ready to collapse.
Yes, those are actual real figures. I even ran it about ten times just so I could make sure it wasn't a misprint or a fluke. I would imagine that being that Batman was coded for multiple GPU use (being an Nvidia based game) and to see Physx (which wasn't running) that it can actually make some use of those 4 GPUs. However, sadly it was too little too late. My mind had already been made up on Quadfire.
Final Thoughts.
Do not, under any circumstances waste your money on Quadfire.Sorry, but it has to be said. It's crap, it's terrible and like all of the other Quadfire owners on the face of our lovely planet you will end up disabling Crossfire in the control panel and the second card will be a nice slot filler for the back of your case. It serves absolutely no other purpose than to absolutely destroy your gaming perfomance and lead you down the primrose path to fool's gold believing you can get it doing what every one else can not. Hint - you can't, it's f***ed and it just doesn't work.
There is no mythical driver update or fix that will resolve this because it isn't a driver problem. Crossfire/Quadfire will scale in every game you run it with. Sadly, one of the five or so games I tried it with could actually understand what was going on. And, even with those immense framerates it was still stuttery and I would not want to live with it. You can not do to a game what the designers simply have not done. So basically it won't make a rat's arse worth of difference how much of your time and energy you waste, it's simply not going to work.
I would love to promise you that in the future this will change but it will not. Game coders are not going to waste time and money coding in stuff for stupid people. Sorry if that sounds offensive, but take my stupidity, laugh at me and don't waste your valuable time or money. Now I knew this was going to be the end result and I have rehearsed this final part of the writeup over and over. And for £50 (because the Asus board will now be making a cosy new home for my 5770s and Phenom 2 940 with Noctua 14 thinger) it was worth it just to see, so that maybe I can stop silly people from wasting £600 on that extra 5970 that is only going to ruin their day.
The only possible way I could actually justify setting up Quadfire is for -
1. How it looks (because it is such a phallus enlarging look)
2. The Vantage scores.
But other than that my friends Quadfire simply has nothing going for it.
