X-bit labs

Caught in the Cross-Fire: ATI RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire Edition Review

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 01/23/2006 | 11:52 AM ]

ATI CrossFire technology in its first incarnation didn’t quite make it due to some serious limitations and the use of out-dated GPUs. The second-generation multi-GPU technology from ATI that we are going to present to you today is free from the earlier drawbacks and is compatible with the state-of-the-art RADEON X1800 graphics processor. How deadly the new CrossFire is for competing solutions? Is it free from the limitations of the previous version? Learn this and more in our review!

Table of contents:

• ATI CrossFire: Imperfect Implementation
  
• ATI CrossFire: How It Works
  
• Closer Look at ATI RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire Edition
  
• Power Consumption
  
• Testbed Configuration and Methods
  
• Image Quality Comparison in Extreme FSAA Modes
  
• Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Battlefield 2
  
• The Chronicles of Riddick
  
• Call of Duty 2
  
• 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
  
• Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
  
• Performance in Simulators
  
• Colin McRae Rally 2005
  
• Pacific Fighters
  
• Performance in Strategies
  
• Age of Empires 3
  
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War
  
• Performance in Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Aquamark 3
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark03
  
• Futuremark 3DMark05
  
• Conclusion
  
• Flawless CrossFire
  
• CrossFire Works – And Works Well
  
• Market Perspectives
  

Any new technology, especially a promising one, encounters all manner of obstacles as it is finding its way into the market. Although it may have tremendous potential and offer unique opportunities, the new technology often suffers from numerous imperfections and flaws but it sheds them as the developers are polishing it off. So it’s only after the required level of reliability and compatibility is achieved that the user can enjoy the final product as it was conceived by the developer.

NVIDIA’s multi-GPU SLI technology was likewise born with huge potential, but didn’t work at all or worked incorrectly with a number of games. Some critics were skeptical about the technology relying heavily on the software, but this eventually turned to be the salvation. In fact, the hardware part of NVIDIA SLI technology was originally designed very cleverly and needed no later improvement that would have been quite costly. At least it would have taken more time and money than the company spent to perfect its ForceWare driver. After a while the incompatibility problems were solved and SLI even acquired some new features like better-quality full-screen antialiasing modes and the option to synchronize the linked graphics cards via a PCI Express bus.

The technology got highly popular among hardcore PC gamers as it long remained the single readily available multi-GPU technology on the consumer 3D graphics market. There was just no other alternative. This monopoly was broken on September 26, 2005, with the actual release of the CrossFire technology by ATI Technologies (for details see our review called Swords Crossed: ATI CrossFire Platform Review). The CrossFire technology had first been announced back on the 30th of May, but had remained on paper due to technical problems (for details you can check out our article called ATI Crosses the Swords: Multi-GPU CrossFire Technology Previewed). Well, we should probably talk only about an attempt to break NVIDIA’s monopoly because it wouldn’t be a big mistake to call that attempt a failure.