2560x1600 – High/Medium/Low
At this extreme resolution, where I'm sure many owners of GeForce GTX 480 SLI and Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire configurations like to game, we start to see a lot of graphics cards failing. Finally, Crossfire starts to show some benefits with a 42% performance increase when going from a single Radeon HD 5870 to the dual Crossfire configuration.
Sadly we cannot say the same for SLI. Clearly the technology is not working in Splinter Cell Conviction using the current patch/drivers.
With just 33fps on average, even the (single) Radeon HD 5870 struggled to provide perfectly playable performance here.
Using the medium preset we still see that Crossfire is working, though this time the Radeon HD 5870 duo only provided a 21% performance boost. The single Radeon HD 5870 configuration is again just a single frame slower than the GeForce GTX 480, with both graphics cards rendering well over 40fps.
The Radeon HD 5850 also broke the 40fps barrier with 42fps, while everything else rendered under this mark. Next best was the Radeon HD 4890 with 35fps, followed by the 4870 with 33fps, and then finally the GeForce GTX 285 with 32fps.
Using the low quality settings at such extreme resolution is an unlikely scenario, but for a complete picture we tested that anyway. As you can see, the benefits of Crossfire technology have now been negated.
At 2560x1600 the Radeon HD 4850 was able to break 40fps, with 9 other tested graphics cards also delivering more than 40fps on average.