One or Two Graphics Cards?

December 6, 2011 7:11 PM

My brother needs some help with choosing a graphics card or cards and has asked me to refer the question to Ask Metafilter.

Need to know if I can get the same performance for games / graphic intensive applications like photoshop / 3d rendering software from a single: Link to Card
 
or if there is a cost effective card that can achieve the same performance of the above single card by having two of them run in SLI.
 
It’s a geek question that needs some serious techies to answer it.
 
Cheers,

posted by Pseudology to Technology (7 answers total)

SLI is only useful in very specific cases, and it's also really only cost effective if you're already maxing out in one card. Add that to the fact that sometimes SLI set-ups don't behave properly because of drivers, and sometimes perform worse, and it's usually the better bet to just get the best single card you can get for the money.
posted by thewumpusisdead at 7:35 PM on December 6, 2011

Also, I have to mention that Photoshop doesn't really ever use the 3D part of the graphics card (which is what you're paying for), so really only games should be part of this discussion.
posted by thewumpusisdead at 7:41 PM on December 6, 2011

As much as I love the green, for questions like these I usually go over to Tom's Hardware. Perhaps your brother might want to post this question to the Graphic Cards forum.
posted by forthright at 8:26 PM on December 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

That card is at or near the top of the rankings pile (depending on who is doing the ranking, some put the dual-GPU cards ahead of it, but most of the benchmarks show the 580 ahead of the 590 for example).

Depending on the resolution and the games he wants to play, SLI can be (but not always is) a boon. I have my doubts as to whether the kind of rendering he's talking about is really as intense as he thinks it is in terms of 3D graphics. For the rendering and of course for Photoshop he would be better served investing in a quality CPU and RAM (8GB is more than fine, 16GB is also nice but not strictly necessary if he can get it affordably).

He should probably more carefully consider his use case and then explore the reams of information on whether SLI is useful in his case from Tom's Hardware and the nVidia SLI forums.
posted by asciident at 8:28 PM on December 6, 2011

i second the tom's hardware suggestion and want to point you towards Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart.
posted by nadawi at 8:54 PM on December 6, 2011

Games these days all come out of consoles as well, which has slowed the mad march of graphics hardware requirements right down. That said, what's he wanting to play? If it's stuff that's not cutting edge, an older card will be entirely satisfactory (as long as it's a good one like a 9800GT 1 gig).

If he's wanting something up to date, Nvidia seem to have the best combination of drivers and card quality right now, so I'd go for them over AMD's Radeons. As for a card, a single GTX 560Ti will monster any game currently in existence and is my recommendation.

Personally I'm on an Nvidia GTX 460 (several steps down) which I'm very happy with and is a very good price/performance point, before that I was on an Nvidia 9800GT from 2008 (which still ran nearly everything on max settings, though not in widescreen).

As for SLI, don't do it. It's not that it can't work very well (it can), but it's generally a poor bang for the buck, is noisy and power sucking, creates lots of potential problems with glitches and weird drivers and is pretty much unnecessary.

One last point, also be aware that the memory on a card is only modestly relevant - 2 gig (say) doesn't mean your card will go faster, just that it can more easily handle big resolutions and detailed textures. Think of it like megapixels on a camera.
posted by Sebmojo at 12:33 PM on December 7, 2011

Having looked at the link, That 580 is a total monster, and is almost certainly a lot more than he needs. I'd buy this.
posted by Sebmojo at 12:38 PM on December 7, 2011