X-bit labs

Love at First Touch: ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 Review (page 11)

Category: Chipsets

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 03/27/2006 | 02:34 PM ]

Testbed Configurations and Test Methods

Our goal was to check the capabilities of the ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset, so we decided to compare it with a platform on ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition as well as with a platform on Nvidia nForce4 SLI X16. Thus, there were three mainboards:

• ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe (CrossFire Xpress 3200, ATI RD580 + ULi M1575)
• ATI Reference Board (Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition, ATI RD480 + SB450)
• ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 SLI X16, Nvidia nForce SPP 100 + nForce4 SLI)

The rest of the components were the same for all the platforms:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU (2 x 2.40GHz, 2 x 1MB L2 cache)
• OCZ PC3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2 x 1GB, CL2-3-2-5)
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer) and Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 (Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer) hard disk drive
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W power supply (ELT620AWT)
• Dell P1130 and Dell P1110 monitors (21”, 1800x1440@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 6.2
• Nvidia ForceWare 81.98

We used two Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire and two GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards on ATI’s and Nvidia’s platforms, respectively, to build the corresponding multi-GPU subsystems.

Before testing the platforms in games, we carried out a small theoretical examination with the following programs:

• Futuremark PCMark05 build 110
• Futuremark 3DMark2001 SE build 330
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 120
• WinRAR 3.51
• X-bit PCI Express bandwidth tester 1.0
• Serious Magic Texture Download Benchmark 1.0

The three platforms were all equipped with a single Radeon X1900 XTX for these tests.

These games and applications were used as performance benchmarks:

First-Person 3D Shooters

• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Doom 3
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R.
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
• Project Snowblind
• Quake 4
• Serious Sam 2
• Unreal Tournament 2004

Third-Person 3D Shooters

• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Simulators

• Colin McRae Rally 2005
• Pacific Fighters

Strategies

• Age of Empires 3
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War

Semi-synthetic benchmarks

• Aquamark 3

Synthetic benchmarks

• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 120

To avoid CPU-imposed limitations, we didn’t test 1024x768 resolution, but tested the popular 1280x1024 mode, which is the native resolution of most 17” and 19” LCD monitors today, and the resource-consuming resolution of 1600x1200, which is often selected by owners of large monitors with a diagonal of over 19”.

We select the highest graphics quality settings in each game, the same for ATI’s and Nvidia’s solutions, except for the flight sim Pacific Fighters which requires vertex texturing support to enable its Shader Model 3.0 mode. The Radeon X1000 family doesn’t support this feature and runs the game in the Shader Model 2.0 mode. We do not edit the games’ configuration files. If possible, we use the games’ built-in benchmarking tools and if not, we measure the frame rate with the FRAPS utility. We measure minimal as well as average fps rates whenever possible.

We didn’t test the systems in the “pure speed” mode, but added two new modes to our traditional “eye candy” settings (4x FSAA + 16x anisotropic filtering): Super AA/SLI AA 8x + AF 16x and Super AA 14x/SLI AA 16x + AF 16x. We turned on the 4x FSAA + 16x AF mode from the game’s own menu if it was possible. Otherwise, we forced the necessary mode from the ForceWare driver as we also did for the higher levels of full-screen antialiasing.

The drivers were set up as usual.

ATI Catalyst :

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: Off
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• Quality AF: Off
• Other settings: default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Image Settings: Quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: On
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: On
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On
• Transparency antialiasing: Off
• Other settings: default