I've got a Crossfire enabled motherboard that supports 4 video cards and I want to know if The AMD Radeon R series has any significant advancement in technology over the AMD HD series, specifically an HD 6870 which is the minimum requirements for a game I have. Anything besides things like fabrication processes, steam processors, and clocks which I think can just be added up amongst all of the video cards.
R9 390, or r9 380 4gb edition. Would advice against multi gpu setups. I would also look into a gtx 970 for the overhead, which might be more noticeable with your cpu. Any of those gpu will offer you 4-5 times the performance you were getting with your gpu. Going up means you will need a complete upgrade, and going for a lesser gpu, isn't worth it. In any case, no multiple gpu setup.
From my personal experience AMD GPUs R9 SERIES specially 290x/390x who have 8 GB VRAM are the best value GPUs for your money.Fury 4 GB is not enough powerful and has not enough VRAM to compete with 980ti 6 GB VRAM. Right now 290x 8 Gb and the rebadged 390x 8 Gb is more future proof than fury x series... Since Crimson appeared the only SIGNIFICANT advance in drivers is the power saving feature almost nobody want at the expense of performance and the drop of customer crossfire option and 3 months later AAA CFX profile support.(Fallout 4...) I will not recommend a crossfire right now...even to my worst enemy.
NVIDIA 980 if you plan on keeping it until late 2016. For anything more I would suggest the 390x. Crossfire/SLi is a bad idea in general. No matter how good (or bad) NVIDIA and AMD try to support it, it ultimately falls on the game developers, and nobody seems to give a damn any more. Stay with a more powerful single GPU instead. Less latency, less trouble.
I have not owned anything but SLI or Crossfire for at least the last 10 years, In certain games it really helps out most multiplayer on line game I don't use it. I have found that AMD crossfire is much more user friendly then SLI but sli seems to used in more games. Benchmarking is way more fun with xfire or sli! I have fury my res is only 3440x1440 but memory is not even close to being a problem for me. 4g with HMB is more then enough.
There are rumours that multi GPU will take off with DX12 and reach levels it should always have been. BUT... still waiting + also even after proper launch there will not be many game supporting it. (unless they manage to wangle Good multi GPU support backwards compatible with older games somehow?? don't see that as impossible perhaps) This year will be seeing some rather good GFx card releases, which if nothing else will help lower the price of existing ones Have been using a Good single card solution since dual Voodoo 2 days and no regrets here! EDIT: oh, and 4GB HBM VRAM on Fury cards is no problem. They make much more efficient use of video memory that older GDDR5 solutions do, making them about equivalent to a 6GB older solution in terms of quantity of VRAM. (last I'd heard)
Forget Crossfire Xing your current card because at this point in the game 1gb of Vram is very long in the tooth. I would just purchase 380X or a 390 and call it a day or if you have the cash a 980 or a 980 ti would be good as well.
Developers still need to support multi-GPU. Support is lacking today. Not sure about HBM efficiency. GCN 1.2 is supposed to be more efficient but not by that much. http://www.guru3d.com/articles_page...graphics_performance_benchmark_review,10.html
I remember seeing that graph, does raise some questions. Though I guess the efficient management comes into play once pushed to its volume limits (though that was not the impression I was given tbh) At least it seems to have no negative impact I've heard of in 4K resolutions with games, even with custom texture packs etc
