Having come from the launch of the GTX 480 and GTX 470 back in late March, NVIDIA has already done a lot to improve the performance of the GTX 470, and as a result in most of our GPU limited games the GTX 470 and the Radeon HD 5870 end up in a close battle for supremacy. This breaks down in Bad Company 2 and STALKER, where AMD still manages to hold on to a lead.
However we see a curious thing when looking at our GTX 470 SLI results: a single GTX 470 is often competitive with a Radeon 5870, but in SLI/CF this ceases to be the case. It’s clear from the first game that the GTX 470 is getting more out of SLI than the Radeon HD 5850/5870 are getting out of Crossfire, and as a result the GTX 470 SLI convincingly wins most of the games in our suite. Only in STALKER and Bad Company 2 do the Radeon cards scale better in CF than the GTX 470 in SLI, which is consistent with the fact that the Radeon cards already do very well in those games in the first place.
Overall the average multi-GPU scaling factor for the 5870CF is 1.71x while the average scaling factor for the GTX 470 is 1.82x. The GTX 470 undoubtedly does a better job scaling in multi-GPU configurations than the 5870 does, leading to the more clear-cut wins for the GTX 470 SLI.
