If you wanted nothing but ultimate performance in games, CrossFire and SLI were the only options for a long time. DirectX 12 was intended to offer an alternative, but it doesn't seem to be the promised holy land for multi-GPU setups. That is why it is high time to take stock: is the combination of several video cards still relevant in 2018, or does the fairy tale of CrossFire and SLI have an unhappy ending?

To make a good judgment of CrossFire and SLI in the present day, we have had dual-GPU configurations of the top models from both camps go through our full 3D chip test. That's the same test we use to test a new GPU at launch. We went through the entire test course with both the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 in CrossFire and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti in SLI.