GTX 980 Ti vs R9 Fury X SLI/CrossFire Face-Off

Two of fastest GPUs on the planet double up in SLI and CrossFire. Can we actually sustain 4K at 60fps on max settings across our benchmark suite?

Games Tested:

00:42 - Battlefield 4
01:38 - Shadow of Mordor
02:15 - Grand Theft Auto 5
04:12 - Assassin's Creed Unity
05:19 - Far Cry 4
06:22 - Ryse: Son of Rome
06:57 - Crysis 3

[detmer]

CPU-bound doesn't mean we are actually hitting a CPU-limitation. We are hitting a DirectX 11 draw call limitation and DirectX 11 very limited multi-core support. Crysis 3 also a great example were the developers really hard try to bypass these DirectX11 limitations by giving every core a specific task. Regardless when we pushing 2013 game to extreme levels you can hit limitations because one specific core is overloaded at work at a specific time...

[TechWizMaster]

Amazing work, can't give this channel enough praise for this...keep it up you guys are the best...just so you know your videos are being linked all the time on many pc tech forums such as linustechtips and the like...you are becoming a reference and a go to source for PC gaming.

[projectocamero]

I have a EVGA Gtx 980 ti on my rig but I know that if Nvidia does not touches a game (like gameworks, etc) AMD could perform as or almost better that Nvidia's gpu's.

Really hate when companies want to have a monopoly.

[chrisrock]

This is super interesting guys. I learned a bit from this video. I think my main take away atm is that SLI and Crossfire are not worth the investment currently.

Keep up the great work guys. You helped me pick my GPU by providing second to none testing and comparison between cards.

Can I suggest setting up Patreon? I would like to support the channel.

[Pan_Z]

This really help shows what games are optimized for what kind of hardware. You guys should have done The Witcher 3 as well

[yancgc]

Hey Digital Foundry, I have a solution to your CPU limitation. Just get an i7 5960x and overclock it to 4.4 maybe 4.5GHZ, but...disable hyper threading. Games like GTA 5 don't use that many CPU threads efficiently, and can lead to a negative performance impact. This solution is used by other game testers on YouTube, and it works. But don't just take my word for it, search it and test it for yourselfs, since that is what you guys do. Thanks for reading. :)

[GeekdomCentral]

It seriously amazes me that these guys only have ~171, 000 subscribers... I see them all over the internet linked in all sorts of articles, they should have way more.

[MeeJaysNet]

Did you use the Crismon Drivers for the Fury X ? Because the R9 Fury X with the Crismon drivers are far away above the 980Ti now :)

[ramair]

a few things to note, 1 you will get much better fps in BF4 with a x99 quad channel memory, 2 in GTA5 vram and gpu arch is king.(more on die cache will help) i also thought i was cpu limited in GTA5 how ever adding more titanx's actually helped frame rates as cards were added.(ie i was able to add more cpu limiting details such as draw distance and foliage with out hurting fps as it did with a single titanx). furyx simply does not have the required vram for the game with out more opimizations. everyone says vram is not needed only optimization. well thats true to a point but what about the games that are not optimized vram is still the only option users have to help on a game that is out now and not yet optimized.
liked and subed great job guys keep it up!

[kodemasterx]

Awesome video guys, as always very instructive and professional...

[ВасянНирванов]

i love this channel for real tests? thanx guys, you are best)

[LiquidSnakeSSJ]

Thanks for the super-informative videos, Digital Foundry! Very helpful!

[marilyto]

Never go with sli, waste of money and extra heat, All the new games that just came out don't support SLI, AC Syndicate, Just Cause 3, Fallout 4 and last but not least Rise of The Tomb Raider. My second 980ti is going for sale this weekend, Tired of the horrible sli support.

[detmer]

I get up to 92% scaling with GTA V and Two R9 280X's.

With multi-gpu setups it's not uncommon to be CPU-bound. For some games it doesn't matter, for other games it will turn unto one big stutter party were the high-frame rates won't match the experience (80fps feels more like 40fps). This can however is easily be 100% fixed when you turn on V-sync...


CPU-bound doesn't mean we are actually hitting a CPU-limitation. We are hitting a DirectX 11 draw call limitation and DirectX 11 very limited multi-core support. Crysis 3 also a great example were the developers really hard try to bypass these DirectX11 limitations by giving every core a specific task. Regardless when we pushing 2013 game to extreme levels you can hit limitations because one specific core is overloaded at work at a specific time...

[xxliveeatingxx]

Very interesting video indeed! I think it's very funny that all the PC Master Race kiddies can somehow achieve 4K ultra settings at 60fps and you're struggeling using two graphics cards that cost combined around 1500$. I really think that 4K might be the future someday, but from today's perspective burning money would be much more efficient!

[NedjoKovacevic]

Guys for a channel that does know about technical stuff beneath what they talk about, I'm really surprised you still haven't made some of the basic updates of your benchmarking suite! Here are just some of examples that are so obvious, given they use updated version of their engines:

BF4 -> SW: Battlefront
AC: Unity -> AC: Syndicate
Ryse -> State of Decay Remastered

just couple suggestions.

[DfzHybrid]

Unless someone brings out a miracle GPU at a good price, 4k is still a fair way away. 144hz/ultra wide/1440p is the way to go.
If you could choose, what would you pick?

[TehBlackNinjaProductions]

It'll probably be too much info on one screen. But could you also show the CPU and GPU usages as well in your benchmarks, so that we can see how well modern games utilize components?

[kyntraz]

Good work. I wanna see what it could work by the fx8350

[leonixsc]

What program/ software do you use for analysing video games FPS/Stutters?

Great video as always :D