Although the split housing arrangement adds wetted area (hence boundary layer drag) to the gas flow, the advantages more than offset that drag increase. In instances where pulse energy recovery has been optimized, it is often possible, based on calculations using pressure and temperature losses across the turbine, to observe very high turbine efficiencies, which some experts say are in excess of 100%.
Pulses which are evenly-spaced but too close together will reduce the effectiveness of this pulse energy recovery. Apparently, that phenomenon is seen on even-fire inline 4-cylinder engines as well as on individual banks of flat-crank V8 engines, where the pulse separation is 180°. I was told that the ideal pulse separation was in the neighborhood of 240 crankshaft degrees, and that, on an even-fire (single-plane crankshaft) inline-4 (as opposed to the two-plane crankshafts used in some Moto-GP motorcycle engines) it is better to separate the end cylinders into one side and the center two into the other side of the turbine than to run all four together into an undivided scroll housing.