Market Perspectives

So ATI now offers a working alternative to NVIDIA’s SLI, but how appealing this product is? The recommended price of the RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire Edition being $599, the combined cost of the corresponding CrossFire platform will be $1200 – without the mainboard and power supply. This is not too much in comparison with the cost of two GeForce 7800 GTX, which is about $1000. Multi-GPU systems are assembled to make high resolutions with turned-on full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering playable and the RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire looks preferable to the GeForce 7800 GTX SLI in almost all the games we’ve used in this review. The Super AA 14x mode is available most of the time, while SLI AA 16x, although it does ensure a noticeably higher antialiasing quality, is such a difficult algorithm that the performance of the SLI platform sinks below playable level in nearly every game. Moreover, the RADEON X1800 architecture allows using FSAA and HDR simultaneously, while the GeForce 7 architecture does not.

A SLI configuration with two GeForce 7800 GTX 512 may challenge the RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire. It would be faster, but more expensive (up to $1500) and it still wouldn’t allow using FSAA and HDR at once. Moreover, such graphics cards are scarcely available on the market and some PC manufacturers have been delaying their systems with GeForce 7800 GTX 512 by a month and longer at the time of our writing this review.

Thus, the current implementation of CrossFire technology seems to be a good choice for a wealthy PC enthusiast. It is not going to be a sensation since the multi-GPU system market is in fact small, but it will surely occupy a niche of its own. Moreover, the upcoming RADEON X1900 family promises to push the performance bar of CrossFire systems even higher. NVIDIA should take care to reaffirm its current leadership and you will see everything in the practical tests of ATI’s new graphics cards on our site.