ATI Radeon X1950 Pro: CrossFire Done Right
by Derek Wilson on October 17, 2006 6:22 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
F.E.A.R. Performance
F.E.A.R. has a built in test that we make use of in this performance analysis.
This test flies through some action as people shoot each other and things blow
up. F.E.A.R. is very heavy on the graphics, and we enable most of the high end
settings for our test.
During our testing of F.E.A.R., we noted that the "soft shadows" don't really
look soft. They jumped out at us as multiple transparent shadows layered on
top of each other and jittered to appear soft. Unfortunately, this costs a lot
in performance and not nearly enough shadows are used to make this look
realistic. Thus, we disable soft shadows in our test even though it's one of
the large performance drains on the system.
Again we tested with anisotropic filtering at 8x, and all options were on
their highest quality (with the exception of soft shadows which was disabled).
Frame rates for F.E.A.R. can get pretty low for a first person shooter, but
the game does a good job of staying playable down to about 25 fps.
The $400 SLI/CrossFire solutions from NVIDIA and ATI essentially tie each other under F.E.A.R. This does mean that SLI once again scales better than CrossFire, but the X1950 Pro maintains its performance advantage.
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DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
First of all, every site uses their own benchmarking techniques and sequences in the games. Numbers between review sites won't be comparable.For Quake 4 we used ultraquality mode, and this seems to give ATI the advantage over NVIDIA. We don't have a problem with this because we would prefer to tip the scales in favor of the product that can deliver the best performance at the highest image quality.
munky - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Would you rather Ati continued to ship the x1900gt with the original specs, and then a bunch of the cards would have to be RMA'd?DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
We would rather they just run out of x1900 GT cards. They're discontinuing the line anyways, so it seems a little strange to try to increase supply by underhanded means.sri2000 - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
They should ship it under a different model number. Call is the X1900 GTA or something like that (or some other alphabet soup combo that's not already taken) so that people can tell that the different model# = different performance.Goty - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
You guys are ragging on this CF implementation like it's some sub-par solution. The transfer speed may be lower than that used by NVIDIA's SLI bridge, but SLI is simplex while this implementation is full duplex. Being able to send data in both directions at the same time should provide a huge speed boost while using ATi's SuperAA modes.JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Scalability is the key factory. In most benchmarks, SLI gets more of an improvement than CrossFire, indicating that the compositing engine is not an optimal multi-GPU solution. There's almost certainly a decent amount of overhead involved. We do like the new CF connector, but the proof is in the pudding. If 7900 GS is clearly slower in single card configs but often faster in dual-GPU configs, clearly SLI is scaling better than CF.mesyn191 - Friday, October 20, 2006 - link
I don't think its possible to comment on the new CF at all, they've clearly got screwed up drivers for it ATM, but then its ATi so what else is new...I hope AMD cleans up thier driver team because still even after all these years ATi does a half assed job on its drivers.
Goty - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Are you guys thinking of doing any testing with any of either vendor's multi-card AA modes any time soon? I really think the full duplex connection would really help there (i.e. the cards may not scale as well with the number of cards, but what about as the image quality increases?)Rza79 - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
The Tech Report had problems with this motherboard and Crossfire which made them switch to the Asus P5W DH.You aren't expiriencing any problems with this board?
Second thing, why no AA with games like B&W2 and FEAR?
DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
No problems with the motherboard.AA performance under Black and White 2 and FEAR were excluded because we decided framerate was already at a minimum for the resolution we were testing.