X-bit labs

Love at First Touch: ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 Review (page 20)

Category: Chipsets

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

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

Quake 4

It’s only in the 14x Super AA mode that the CrossFire Xpress 3200 has any advantage over the older chipset and this advantage amounts to 5% only. This is expectable since the game uses rather simple textures. Coupled with the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire, both chipsets from ATI easily ensure a frame rate of over 90fps in the hardest mode possible.

Serious Sam 2

Unlike in the comparison of the nForce4 SLI and nForce SLI X16 chipset, the newer North Bridge from ATI is better than the RD480. Still, this is a negligible advantage, even though there’s a high textural load in Serious Sam 2 . It’s possible that the combined power of two CrossFire-linked Radeon X1900 is not enough for the higher PCI Express bandwidth to have a bigger impact on the system performance.

The game is playable in the “eye candy” mode only, but even there the speed may bottom out to 10fps and lower. The game is really a demanding application and it also has some problems with graphics cards with GPUs from ATI Technologies.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Like with the nForce4 SLI X16, having the graphics subsystem connected via 32 PCI Express lanes leads to a colossal performance boost, up to 60% in the 14x Super AA mode, even though the CrossFire subsystem has a hardware image-compositing unit. The two Radeon X1900 XT cards on the CrossFire Xpress 3200 beat the SLI pair of GeForce 7800 GTX, although they used to be slower in this game on the older ATI chipset. This seems to be the most vivid illustration of how better the RD580 may be over the RD480, although the game itself is nothing serious for modern graphics hardware and doesn’t even have pixel shaders.