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Catalyst 9.7 CrossFire GPU Scaling: HD 4890 Three-Way Action
George Ross, July 31, 2009

Introduction
Do more GPU's always offer more performance even at the expense of increased power consumption? The answer is no more GPU's do not always yield more graphics performance and yes the power still does increase with each GPU added. Keeping this in mind let's see if how well three HD 4890's scale using the Catalyst 9.7 driver release and see if the Catalyst 9.7 brings in any better CrossFire performance over it's predecessor.

Test Hardware
I have to give credit to the Rosewill Xtreme RX750-S-B power supply that was used in testing it performed wonderfully under a great load. Here are the rest of the particulars of the test system.

Processor AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition @ 3.8GHz
Motherboard FOXCONN A79A-S
Memory G.SKILL 4GB DDR2 1100 (PC2 8800) @ 533MHz (DDR 1066) 5-5-5-15 Dual Channel Mode
Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM 32MB cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
Video Cards MSI Radeon HD 4890 @ 880 MHz core 999 MHz (3996 Gb/s) memory
Catalyst 9.7
 MSI Radeon HD 4890 @ 880 MHz core 999 MHz (3996 Gb/s) memory
MSI Radeon HD 4890 @ 880 MHz core 999 MHz (3996 Gb/s) memory
Catalyst 9.7
 MSI Radeon HD 4890 @ 880 MHz core 999 MHz (3996 Gb/s) memory
MSI Radeon HD 4890 @ 880 MHz core 999 MHz (3996 Gb/s) memory
MSI Radeon HD 4890 @ 880 MHz core 999 MHz (3996 Gb/s) memory
Catalyst 9.7
Optical Disk Drive Pioneer DVR-215DBK
Power Supply Rosewill Xtreme RX750-S-B 750W
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1

Gaming Benchmarks

Adding a HD 4890 gives you an 18% overall average boost in 3D Marks and adding another HD 4890 on top of that only increases that boost to 22% over using single HD 4890.

As you can plainly see using CrossFire for playing Unreal Tournament III has no pay off whatsoever.

With the Crysis tested the single card setup outpaces both the two and three card setup in overall average frames per second, but the added GPU's do allow for higher playable resolutions.

Using CrossFire to play World in Conflict is also not a very smart move.

Devil May Cry 4 is a game that has always positively reacted well with increases in graphics power and does not disappoint using the second HD 4890 to achieve a 90% overall average frame rate increase and adding the third HD 4890 upped the increase to 230% over the single HD 4890.

Taking all the game tests into consideration going with a two-way CrossFire rig gives you a 39% improvement in overall average frame rates and stepping up to a three-way rig will give you a 52% hike in overall average frame rates. Also worth mentioning is the Catalyst 9.7 is slightly better at handling CrossFire at least as far as two-way CrossFire is concerned outperforming the Catalyst 9.6 by 1% in my test bed.

Power Consumption
More GPU's equals more power and more power equals more heat'

Conclusion
As always there is room for improvement in CrossFire based multi-GPU solutions. Oh how great it would be if it were as simple as to installing an additional graphics card into a system and it yielded great dividends, but this is the real world and nothing is that easy. It is nice to see a slight increase in CrossFire performance with the new Catalyst 9.7.


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