NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 SLI versus ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossFire

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

So, you might not have known it when you read this article, but this will likely be the very last ATI versus NVIDIA article ever written here at Legit Reviews. When the first Radeon HD 6xxx parts are announced next month they will be going by the name AMD and not ATI. So, in this final battle between current generation ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards which came out on top? Well, if you look at the final FPS or score at a resolution of 1920×1200 the ATI Radeon HD 5770 comes out leading in five benchmarks versus four for the GeForce GTS 450. You also have to factor in the ATI Radeon HD 5770 uses slightly less power, but runs hotter than the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450. After all the testing you can see that the performance between these two cards is pretty darn close, but remember the purpose of this article was to look at SLI versus CrossFire and that means how well performance scales when another card is added to your system.

For this I took the performance results at 1920×1200 once again and found out how well performance scaled when going from one card to a two card multi-GPU setup. I then averaged all the scores for NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire and found that of the nine games and benchmarks that we tested the NVIDIA SLI configuration had better scaling efficiency than ATI CrossFire by roughly ten percent. The NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 SLI setup scaled up on average 88.92% better than a single GeForce GTS 450 video card. The ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossFire setup was no slouch, though, and scaled on average 78.41% better than a single Radeon HD 5770.

Therefore, I am comfortable saying that NVIDIA SLI does scale better than ATI CrossFire because out of the nine tests we ran, never once did the CrossFire solution scale better than NVIDIA SLI! Both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations were found to be easy to setup and use though, so if you are on the fence about adding a second card to your system for improved performance you can expect to see very good performance improvements across a wide variety of game titles. I hope you enjoyed this article as it was fun to benchmark a topic that often doesn’t get as much attention as you would expect due to time constraints. If you have any questions or comments be sure to leave them in the forum!

Legit Bottom Line: NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire have been in a scaling battle for years, but on this day NVIDIA SLI has better scaling performance.