X-bit labs

Love at First Touch: ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 Review (page 17)

Category: Chipsets

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

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

Far Cry

The CrossFire-linked Radeon X1900 XT cards ensure a comfortable frame rate with any Super AA level. The advantage of the CrossFire Xpress 3200 over the Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition is negligible and only shows up in 1600x1200 resolution with turned-on Super AA.

It’s quite different on the Research map: the new platform from ATI is considerably slower than the older one at 4x full-screen antialiasing when each of the graphics card is rendering its own frames (the AFR mode). There’s nothing like that in the Super AA modes where the CrossFire Xpress 3200, on the contrary, ensures a certain performance bonus, obviously due to the increased bandwidth of the graphical PCI Express slots.

The load on the PCI Express bus is higher in HDR mode, so the two complete PCI Express x16 slots of the CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset provide a performance gain even at 4x FSAA as well as at 8x Super AA. In the latter case the resolution of 1600x1200 is not quite playable, but in 1280x1024 you can enjoy the superb image quality without any slowdowns.

The same is true for the Research map: 1600x1200 resolution with 8x Super AA is beyond the capabilities even of such a powerful graphics subsystem as Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire.