AnandTech Exclusive: CrossFire Benchmarks Revealed
by Derek Wilson on July 22, 2005 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Doom 3 Performance
For Doom 3, we see CrossFire outperforming the 7800 GTX and coming close to NVIDIA 6800 Ultra SLI performance. The OpenGL foundation of Id's Doom 3 is generally handled better by NVIDIA's parts, and Doom 3 in particular makes heavy use of shadow algorithms that tend to favor NVIDIA as well. All this adds up to mean that CrossFire has shown some very solid performance in our first benchmark.While the increase in performance isn't quite double, the performance increase from a single X850 XT to CrossFire is up 43% as opposed to SLI's benefit of 34% over a single card. This is very impressive indeed. It may be that the higher single card performance of the NVIDIA part means that it has less room to improve, but no matter what the reason, this first test instantly legitimizes CrossFire as a real SLI competitor. ATI definitely has something to smile about here.
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Furen - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
X850 crossfire doesnt seem too apealing in a world with the 7800GTX. This would have been great 6 months ago, or even 3.Cookie Crusher - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Maybe I was a bit hasty in my disappointment, but still, I expected Ati to come over the top with something special. :(Looks like there will be plenty of battles this coming year between sli and crossfire.
The trick is: who can make their dual card solutions more affordable?
Cookie Crusher - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
I would have expected a little more than the results posted....but oh well, hurry up already ati.Hasse - Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - link
Nice, Don't know what to say... It's nice to see Anandtech's involvement in the discussion!I'ld like to point that as a halfway gamer I did get rid of a Sony F520 which did 2048x1536 at 85Hz, and it was beautiful and HUGE. It ate all the space on my desktop so when transforming to LCD which uses allmost no space there are a few issues to consider. Like responsetime, colors, artifacts yadda yadda yadda. I found a nice companion in the Nec 2080UX+ which is a 20" 16ms panel, and I have no smearing, no artifacts, vivid colors and last but not least NO lag what so ever..
Apart from that back to topic:
I feel that ATI has made a good effort, while abit late it's still nice from a consumers stand to have competition. What makes me a bit worried is the way ATI made their solution. As a consumer I'ld really not get stucked with a card that REQUIRES a slave card to work at all (correct me if I'm wrong..), that is you cannot run a CrossFire card by itself in a system. Whilst Nvidia's solution is more flexible (you can run your system with either one of the cards used in SLI).
I wonder also if CrossFire will work with cards from different vendors, as that was one of the quirks Nvidia was bothered about (same vendor and bios).
I'm also concerned about how much trouble Anandtech had getting the setup to work properly, ok it's a prerelease, but Giga said it was close to finished... shuld we be worried? Who knows... I've had bad encounters with highend ATI cards in the past, whilst my friends have had few or none. It makes me wonder if CrossFire is having the same trouble with drivers as the "old" drivers had with standard ATI cards....
Lastly, I find it annoying as a consumer to have to buy a more (in case of XT -> Crossfire) expensive card than the one I allready have because the new one also supports the faster XT PE.. (correct me if I'm wrong regarding the cost and so forth...)...
Last.. Despite all my reservations regarding ATI's solution to Nvidia's SLI I'm still very interested in the development, and not least: Will CrossFire also come for R520 (probably, but if they're having this much trouble with x850 how will the new cards fare?)
Thanks for the Article. Kepp up the good work.
Best Regards
Hasse
Hasse - Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - link
And Stupid as I am I pressed reply.. I should have pressed post a new comment.. sorry.-Hasse