X-bit labs

Love at First Touch: ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 Review (page 15)

Category: Chipsets

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

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

Serious Magic Texture Download Benchmark 1.0

This test outputs a simple black-and-white image on the screen and can work in two modes: 1) render and display, and 2) render and download. The second mode helps measure the speed of texture transfers into the graphics memory and back.

In the “render and display” mode we can see that the GeForce 7800 GTX outputs the picture on the screen faster than the Radeon X1800/X1900 cards do, and this is the single point to be made here.

The “render and download” mode yields much more valuable information. The CrossFire Xpress 3200 is not the best working with the GeForce 7800 GTX – the single-chip nForce4 SLI proves to be faster. The performance grows up when we install the Radeon X1900 XTX, but not to the level of the older chipset from ATI. What’s curious, we observe the same performance slump with the Radeon X1800 XL here. Most likely a lot of temporary registers in R580 compared with R520 helps the former quite noticeably, because the Radeon X1900 XTX does better even at reduced frequencies than the Radeon X1800 XL.

Unfortunately, both tests are aimed at measuring only the peak performance of the PCI Express bus, which may sometimes be not representative of the true hardware performance in real games and applications. And real applications may require simultaneous data transfer from and to the system memory.

There is yet no reliable method to measure the PCI Express bandwidth when transferring data from one graphics card to another, the efficiency of the CrossFire Xpress 3200 with two Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire Edition graphics cards installed was checked in the gaming tests only.