Driver issues spoil quad-GPU gaming says HardOCP

Enthusiast tech site HardOCP published a performance review of quad-GPU gaming using competing Nvidia and AMD dual-GPU video cards.

Catering for the ultimate PC gaming enthusiasts, HardOCP compared the performance of two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 SLI’d cards with against a system armed with two AMD Radeon HD 6990 cards in a CrossFireX configuration.

Gamers willing to spend $1,400 and upwards on video cards alone, in systems that were shown to draw a light bulb shy of 1 kilowatt of power, may be disappointed to learn that performance aside, HardOCP’s tests showed up a raft of ‘game issues’.

OCP tester Brent Justice said the mere 1.5GB of RAM on the Nvidia cards were holding them back and the 2GB AMD Radeon HD 6990 cards had "just enough to allow us to use those higher settings that the HD 6990 CrossFireX clearly had the performance to push."

While Justice said the AMD solution offered the better value and had the edge at higher resolutions, he went on to accuse AMD and Nvidia of insufficient "proper real world testing" to ensure that games worked correctly using four video cards.

"We would suggest that most of our readers would be best off with a 3-GPU configuration at the most and 2-GPU solutions show the best performance scaling."

Image: HardOCP