Sli and crossfire difference

[BharathKRISHNA123]

I don't know what is sli and crossfire. I know that sli is for nvidia and crossfire is with amd please explain it to me ...,...... I don't want its hardcore definition just in English ... A NORMAL MANS ENGLISH. ONE I CAN UNDERSTAND CLEARYYYY!!!!!!!!! Please help me ,,please help me

 

[Danger_Noodle]

SLI and crossfire are when a system has multiple GPU's in them working together to produce more horsepower for the system. They must be connected by an SLI bridge (which is a little piece of hardware) and each subsequent GPU after the first adds about half the horsepower you had before to the system. So one GPU would be 1HP, 2 GPUs would be 1.5 HP, 3 GPUs would be 2HP. In theory anyways. Performance may vary. There are absolutely diminishing returns when using SLI or Crossfire.

How is works is the GPUs alternate rendering frames dispersing the workload more evenly among more cards.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

That's all the difference, pretty much. SLI is an Nvidia trademark, Crossfire is an AMD trademark.

AMD also lets you use slightly different model cards (e.g. 7850+7870), whereas SLI requires the same model (e.g. both GTX970).

 

[megamanx00]

Crossfire is flexible, so you can have two slightly different cards (like a 7870 and a 7850) to run in crossfire. Originally you were even supposed to be able to run a 2900 card with a 3800 card but I don't know who would have done that. SLI is less flexible and you need an SLI certified board, but it typically has less CPU overhead. It's best to use two of the exact same cards with the same clocks in either case. Some games are better with crossfire, and others with SLI. Depending on the game and the settings two cards can double the performance, and there are cases where you even get slightly worse performance, but most of the time it's less than that and you get about 1.5 times the performance of a single card