AnandTech Exclusive: CrossFire Benchmarks Revealed
by Derek Wilson on July 22, 2005 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The System
The GA-K8AMVP Pro is based on the ATI's latest RD480 chipset paired with a ULi south bridge and features CrossFire support. We'll be taking a closer look at this board as well, as Gigabyte tells us that it can even support 2x 3D1 cards. The board looks very similar to Gigabyte's NF4 SLI boards, including the selector paddle for configuring the PCI Express ports. Flipped to single GPU, the first PCI Express slot gets 16 lanes, and flipped to multi GPU mode will run each slot at x8.
The board itself is stable and runs well. We had no problems with the platform while running our tests, and performance seems to be very solid. On this board, the master card had to be plugged into the slot closest to the CPU.
Our CrossFire master card looked very similar to a regular X850 XT. The port furthest from the motherboard connects to the dongle, which plugs into the monitor as well as the port closest to the motherboard on the slave card.
The card really does look a lot like a normal X850 XT, but we can see that the solder points for the Rage Theater chip are missing and there are quite a few components on the board in its place. All this circuitry (along with a couple of surface-mount LEDs) is likely part of the hardware needed to combine the output of both cards for final display. NVIDIA's parts don't need quite as many additional board components, as the GPU has die space committed to multi-chip rendering and all the work is done on the GPU and in the frame buffers.
That's not to say that ATI's solution is less adequate. Since the DVI port is inherently digital, the external dongle does nothing to lower image quality like the old analog dongle that 3dfx used to employ for SLI.
Before we get to the benchmarks, we will note again that with the early hardware and drivers, we had some trouble with some of the games and settings that we wanted to run. We tested most of the games that we ran in our recent 7800 launch article, but we ended up seeing numbers that didn't make sense. We don't have any reason to think that these problems will remain when the product launches, but it does shorten the list of games that we felt gave a good indication of CrossFire's performance.
For our tests, we used numbers from our original 7800 GTX review. The system (except for the motherboard) is the same as the setup used in the 7800 review (FX-55, 1GB 2:2:2 DDR400, 600W PSU, 120GB HD).
And what are our results? Take a look.
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rjm55 - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
It seems silly to moan that you can't test higher than 1600x1200. Reality is 19" flat panels are reasonable and a hot buy right now - and they do 1280x1024. To get higher res you have to go at leasr 20" at TWICE the price for 1600x1200 maximum res. Except for the wide scren res blips of 1920 x1200 in the 24" category, the next big jump is at a 30" LCD with the Apple Cinema 30 doing 2560x1600.The point is 1600x1200 or the slightly higher 1920x1200 wide screen is the realistic limit for current LCD displays. It might be nice to know 7800 SLI works more efficiently at 2560x1600 but this is mostly academic since most readers here don't have a 30" Apple Cinema (we all know Anand does).
For me I was very impressed that the ATI chipset and ATI Crossfire more than held their own compared to nVidia even in this preview setup. I'm looking forward to Crossfire chipset tests and overclocking tests to see if this is my next AMD chipset for a nVidia 7800. The nF4 stills seems way too flakey to me and everything I read says the new ATI chipsets run and overclock like a dream. Bring on some chipset results.
jkostans - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
This reminds me of when ATI released the 9700 pro, except they are taking the beating this time. They will recover, these companies always seem to. I think the R520 is going to suprise many people, they are keeping awful quite about it. Also, rememebr that ati is an expert at staying alive with sub-par high-end cards (radeon 8500 and before). The low-end cards are what keeps these companies alive anyways, look at how many pre-built systems have an X300 in them.....Jalf - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Why didn't the article look at how much of a relative improvement X-Fire gives compared to SLI?Yes, Crossfire beats the 6800 SLI in HL2, but what does that mean? A single X850 card beats a single 6800 in that game too.
But 6800 SLI gives a 22% improvement over single-card SLI, while X850 Crossfire only gives roughly half that. (in the no-AA HL2 test. Too lazy to work out all the figures)
Isn't that where it gets interesting? It's no big surprise that two fast cards beats two slightly slower cards, but knowing which multi-card technology provides the biggest boost over single-card speeds, would be a lot more relevant.
Myrandex - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
It is pretty sweet that ATI has nvidia SLI working, and dual 3D1 support. Quad GF6600's sound pretty sweet (or Quad 7800's w/ Asus's solution).Jason
smn198 - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Xfire does give a good % increase over a single card which is promising for ATI's next generation assuming that it will be competitive with the 7800 series. Shame that the current performance doesn't look that good compared to 7800 SLI.gibhunter - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
SLI is a waste of money when you can buy a 7800GTX for $550 at newegg. The increase in power requirements, setup headaches, AA headaches is simply not worth it when you get basically the same kind of performance from a single card.Still, it's good that they have implemented the technology, then again it's completely asynine to require a special, more expensive card to have it running. SLI is cheaper.
Finally, it's stupid to buy this setup just so you can run at 2048/1536 with 4X AA. No one with that kind of cash, runs on an old crt. Everyone with that kind of money has an LCD that's either 1280/1024 or 1600/1200 and for those, a single setup based on the 7800GTX is the cheaper and more reliable solution...unless you're an ATI fanboy. If so, then go waste your cash.
shabby - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Looks good, but when will it hit retail... when pigs fly?GhandiInstinct - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
ATi is worrying me a bit.They're losing customers everyday to the 7800, shouldn't they tease us who haven't converted just a bit so we know they're still alive out there?
Send us a teaser spec or something please!
Johnmcl7 - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
It's a real shame ATi didn't launch their X8xx series crossfire six months ago as #3 says, just seems a waste of time now, roll on R520.John
PeteRoy - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Crossfire will not be what ATI profits from, it needs more value fast cards like Nvidia 6600GT and 6200