ATI 'Crossfire' Benchmarks

[Vox Populi Vox Dei]

Benchmarks http://www.apcstart.com/imageViews/xfire_007.html
http://www.apcstart.com/imageViews/xfire_008.html
http://www.apcstart.com/imageViews/xfire_009.html

For this first look we have run a limited set of benchmarks focused upon 1280x1024 screen resolution, so chosen because it is the standard resolution for the vast majority of LCD screens on the market. Alongside the dual X850XT cards our test setup used the ECS PA1 MVP Extreme motherboard, Pentium 4 3.73GHz Extreme Edition and 1GB of DDR2-667.

First test was 3DMark05. In the standard 1024x768 test the Crossfire configuration came out 40% faster than a single card. However when we increase the load on the graphics subsystem by moving to a 1280x1024 resolution, turning AntiAliasing up to 6x and Anisotropic filtering to 16x we see the Crossfire setup really shine, delivering a score 85% faster than a single card. Moving to the OpenGL based Doom3 we see the Crossfire setup come out 36% faster in testing at 1280x1024 Ultra Quality. In Half-Life 2 we see less of a performance improvement at 1280x1024 with Crossfire coming out 7-10% faster when all details are set to their maximum.

These are the same sort of patterns we see with high end SLI setups as the rest of the system holds the graphics cards back. Thankfully the excess performance can be put to good use by cranking up AntiAliasing and Anisotropic filtering – which translates into excellent image quality across all games.

Keep in mind that this testing was done on pre-release hardware and therefore only gives a rough look at final performance. Once production hardware hits the APC Labs we’ll have a more in depth look at this exciting new technology so keep an eye on APC in the coming months.

Read more: http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/E4CEF9004EDAAAACCA25707B000C48E0

 

[martin]

As I understand it an NVidia SLI setup is still the better choice

 

[rburley]

not really possible to tell yet, wait for crossfire to be released to really see what it can do. What I like about sli is that you can use 2x normal 6xxx cards in them on prob, but for crossfire you need the special crossfire card

 

[mZbZ]

Wohoo Nvidia kicks ass!!!!

 

[Silent_Bob]

i will stick with Nvidia, always choose em!