Shopping for graphics card is tough. AMD has all kinds of technologies like Crossfire, True Audio, Mantle API, great OpenCL performance, and HD 3D while NVidia has SLI, G-Sync, 3D Vision, PhysX and Game streaming. No matter how much you spend on your computer, you can't have all these things at the same time - or can you?
You might be thinking that there is this ultimate, no compromises gaming machine, a machine that has Core i7 processor, 16 gigs of Dominator memory, and most importantly two GTX 780 TIs in SLI and two Radeon R9 296s in Crossfire. You can simply choose which graphics card vendor you want powering the system in any given time, fire up your game and enjoy all the exclusive technologies from both sides on one computer.
Well, this post is not intended to convince you to run out and put a handful of different graphics cards in your system to make sure that you are not missing anything.
For the average gamer, shopping for graphics card is already hard enough. Graphics cards are major purchases so there is a lot of research to do. On top with the price, you have to consider performance in the games you play, cooling, and then you have to pick between a dozen different brands that are all available. Now with the introduction of AMD’s Mantle API and NVidia G-Sync technology, it feels like on top of all of that, gamers have to decide months or even the years ahead of time. They need to decide how they want to experience the games rather than just if they want to experience them because you can only have one and you are going to be stuck with it until you replace it.
We have seen this before with PhysX but most people did not notice or care because PhysX never saw widespread adoption and beyond franchises like Batman and games like Borderlands 2. The gameplay experience was never really affected much by its implementation.
Right now, it is different though, right now Mantle and G-Sync look like they may be widely supported and shoppers will have to choose at the time of purchase whether they want fluid paste frames of G-Sync graphics card and display, or Mantle's so far unparalleled ability to leverage multi core CPU's along with some performance improvements. They have to pick all of these without even knowing things such as whether future titles they want to play will support Mantle, or whether or not do you think monitors will be worth buying.
What the hardware people are asking us to do is crazy. If this is the solution for a gamer to have every experience each game developer intended that isn't it time for something to change and that doesn't even address individual games that will support cross-render technologies like Star Citizen, nothing I do can let me experience Mantle and PhysX in that game when it comes out at the same time. I will always be not quite getting the full experience.
Now with all that said, we actually tried building one. It actually works really well to use both SLI and Crossfire. In fact, switching between Crossfire and SLI is a simple as hooking up the primary card for each of them to a single monitor with two different inputs. I'm using DisplayPort and DVI, and then changing the primary display in the Windows Display Manager. A reasonably modern monitor will auto-detect when you switch. The signal loss from one input and then picks up a new one at the same time.
I tried a couple different monitors in games and the process actually worked very seamlessly to my surprise. Although an NVidia driver does not like to do some other things with the AMD running in the background such as switch between single cards in SLI, which I had to use during my benchmarking. However, you can force close the control panel, make whatever changes, and then relaunch the AMD control panel and it will work just fine at the same time for most things.
