X-bit labs

Two Diamonds: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB CrossFire Review (page 14)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 09/11/2007 | 10:13 AM ]

Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters

Hitman: Blood Money

Like in the other cases, there is little to no difference in performance between the two versions of Radeon HD 2900 XT with the same core frequency. The Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire is competitive against the GeForce 8800 Ultra in terms of average frame rate but has a lower minimum of speed. Anyway, the CrossFire system allows playing normally in resolutions up to 2560x1600 inclusive with enabled FSAA.

Tomb Raider: Legend

This is one of the few games the multi-GPU technology from ATI fails to work correctly in. That’s why the Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire proves to be even slower than the single card irrespective of the amount and frequency of graphics memory. Note, however, that enabling the CrossFire mode leads to a considerable growth in the minimum speed at 2560x1600, which means that the second GPU’s resources are utilized, at least partially. The malfunctioning of CrossFire technology in this test must be due to some special features of the game engine.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent

We try to get the highest possible image quality from each game, but Splinter Cell: Double Agent cannot use FSAA and FP HDR simultaneously. That’s why the results refer to the HDR + 16x AF mode only.

Turning CrossFire technology on leads to a performance hit, but the single Radeon HD 2900 XT is fast in both versions (with 512MB of GDDR3 and with 1024MB of GDDR4), being just 11% slower than the expensive and rare GeForce 8800 Ultra. So, this game shouldn’t be a problem for those people who are about to build a graphics subsystem with two Radeon HD 2900 cards.