1. It's a blog. It's not a wiki. It's not a user's manual. The post is from 2009. If you go digging out old posts, you're going to find old commentary.

2. The main point, which I think you completely missed, is probably still true. My points were:

a. The sweet spot on video cards is not at premium prices. Dual card solutions are virtually always in the premium price band.

b. Video cards have tracked Moore's law, so fill rate gains from more expensive cards or simply more cards will be available at a lower price point in the near future.

c. LR doesn't spend money optimizing for SLI or Crossfire.

All three of these things are still true.

If you disagree with me re: SLI, great. My opinion re: SLI is just that, an opinion, nothing more.

Re: X-Plane not being able to benefit, I am not sure precisely what you are referring to. I think the only claim I am making is that CPU-bound features aren't addressed by SLI, which is basically true. You can't get a higher OBJ count by sticking a second GPU in your system; just more fill rate.

The article at:
http://www.megagames.com/news/html/hardware/sliandcrossfire-acomparison.shtml

Outlines the differences in plain English but gives a radically different picture of the chances of these 2 technologies for adoption in the industry — if you read it with a background like mine.

SLI requires applications to recognize and support that architecture and the drivers must recognize the applications “profile” to support it.

If a given SLI doesn’t recognize an application, it drops back to “compatibility” mode where only 1 card does all the work — total waste of money unless you keep up to date with your drivers any time you install or upgrade a new game or “SLI” application. This is the old Voodoo 2 driver story…

+Fire portion read as if it does not require special driver information to do it’s job. It “just works” but you can configure how it supports applications.

Now I’m still learning/researching this stuff (again — like every 5 years I get to “relearn” this stuff…) but I do have a rather extensive background in the computer industry and I’ve seen a lot of failures show up over time.

A “proprietary” method does tend to be faster when used in its proprietary fashion so I would expect SLI to outperform +Fire with applications that are recognized by SLI but if I don’t want to spend a good deal of time chasing drivers and the like then I’d say I’d probably be better off with +Fire because SLI will not last if game manufacturers (especially on-line games) have to rely upon another company to release driver updates “on-demand” every time they “patch” their video engines.

That just doesn’t work anymore.

If you don’t have enough physical RAM (indicated by any consistent virutal memory paging during flight), more RAM is the way to go. It’s also really cheap compared to a new CPU, top-end video card, or motherboard. So if RAM is an issue, it’s a no-brainer to upgrade.

But please note – RAM isn’t terribly incremental. Once you have “enough” adding more RAM will probably do you no good. There may be cases when you can run higher settings with more RAM, but for a given settings level once you hit no-paging, more RAM won’t help at all.