How stable is SLI/Crossfire ?

[Nichola Ginovaef]

So, I have been reading a few things about SLI/Crossfire that sometimes it reduces performance because the cards have trouble in setting the same fps rate on each card, so my question is, how stable is SLI/Crossfire and are there any ways to make it more stable ?

 

[spat55]

Never had crossfire, although I am thinking about it. Micro-Stuttering is a problem quite often, which means it drops frame rates quickly, so it spikes up and down often, which you should notice a lot.

Next thing is not all games are compatible, so you have to turn one card off.

 

[ittimjones]

it's pretty darn stable. I haven't had any issues with SLI. The only issues I've had have been my older version of EVGA Precision X not OC'ing 1 of the cards, and that causing the driver to crash. That got fixed in a later release, and all is well. I even had SLI on my old 8500 GT's w/o issues. lol. people are talking about "microstuddering". It's not really much of an issue in the newest series cards and drivers.

 

[bryonhowley]

I have three rigs two AMD/ATI with a Crossfire HD 7950 and a Crossfire HD 7970 and the third with a SLI GTX 670. So far I have not had any problems with stutter or micro-stutter with any of my rigs. While some games seem to get more of a boost from Crossfire/SLI than others I have not had any games that played bad. The main thing anymore is at least with the higher end cards like the GTX 670/680 and 7950/7970 based cards if you are only running one monitor at 1080p you really do not need Crossfire/SLI to keep a good frame rate. I run 3 Asus 27" monitors in Eyefinity/Surround at 5760x1080 so at that resolutions Crossfire/SLI can really increase the performance of the cards.

So in the end if you are only running a single monitor go for a single card and get the fastest one you can afford.