Dual core or Crossfire?

CainStar

Honorable
Jul 23, 2014
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So I have owned two dual core GPU's successively, first I bought 4870x2 owned it for about 3-4 years and then bought 6990. I have been very happy with both cards, performance and quality wise. Now both of these cards, at the time, were at a price range of what consider to be "reasonable", but the current generation AMD dualcores are not(between 1200-1600€). I do consider myself to be a "Hardcore" gamer, meaning I want the best performance. Still I am not ready to pay whooping 1600€ for a GPU. I have never had crossfire or SLI configuration.

So here are my questions?

1. Is there a big difference in performance and quality(tech problems), between dual core and crossfire configuration?

2. The prices for dual core cards have soared through the roof, is this permanent or is there some other reason why the current generation dual cores cost so much?

3. Should I wait for next generation GPU's from AMD, NVIDIA and see what happens?
 
Dual-Core GPU's seem to have gone up in price because the efficiency of single-core GPU's has increased, making a dual-core GPU very "enthusiast" grade and not something the average consumer, or gamer for that matter, would purchase.

The 290x can max almost any game, and is about $500-$600. Crossfire is extremely hit or miss, because if the title is optimized properly for it, your FPS can literally double (say 50fps to 100fps) or if it isn't optimized for dual-GPU's, it will barely help at all (I've seen gains as little as 5fps, some games just don't even care that you have another entire GPU just sitting there.)

What kind of games do you play, do you really need a dual-core GPU?