F1 2010 and Civilization V have been out for over two weeks now, and Dead Rising 2 has been out for over a week. Yet, we are still stuck with ATI Catalyst Application Profile 10.9 dated 9/15/2010 and here is F1 2010 performing poorly compared to the competition and Dead Rising 2 not having CrossFireX support at all! It isn't good news for NVIDIA either, in fact their SLI Profile Update 5 is dated way back to 8/16/2010 yet here is Civ 5 with broken SLI. In both cases, Dead Rising 2 did not apply the correct resolution in NV Surround and ATI Eyefinity.

The whole point of these SLI and CrossFireX profile updates are to provide updates for games between driver releases. Yet, AMD seems only content to release CrossFireX Profile updates with each driver release, only releasing new updates when someone like us complains about something. This is not good for SLI and CrossFireX customers. Quite frankly, gamers are being let down, and people playing brand new games are not getting the full benefit of their hardware. If these three games had issues, imagine how many other new games out there also have problems that people just aren't aware of. This needs to be a wakeup call.

The internet has created a sense of immediacy with PC gaming. These days gamers are able to download games at exactly the time it launches, no more having to wait for games to hit the shelves. Many of our readers had their finger on the button ready to play Civilization V the moment it was launched, already pre-loaded via Steam. This seems to be the wave of the future that is already here. The problem is, AMD and NVIDIA are not keeping up with this demand when it comes to NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFireX support in games. The guys that pay the most for these companies products that are the biggest gamers are getting screwed. Thanks for giving me another reason to move to console guys.

The nature of multi-GPU profiles has its weakness, and that weakness means you won't always get SLI or CrossFireX support in a game when you want to play that game. You may end up having to wait weeks, or months before proper multi-GPU acceleration is provided to you. This fact is not new, and we wanted to see if things have gotten better, but they haven't. In fact, these new games we have used here today have been out now for 1-2 weeks, yet all of them seem to have an issue of sort with either CrossFireX or SLI scaling properly, and no profile updates have been released. As a gamer who has invested much money in a dual-GPU configuration, this is frustrating.