X-bit labs

Two Diamonds: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB CrossFire Review (page 20)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

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

Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark05

The overall 3DMark05 scores show the lack of any advantage of the newer, 1GB, version of Radeon HD 2900 XT over the older one, which is equipped with 512 megabytes of graphics memory. The difference of 129 points is likely to be a measurement error.

The results of the CrossFire platform are indicative of the possibility for the user to build a graphics subsystem with a higher overall performance than that provided by a single GeForce 8800 Ultra and for a comparable sum of money because you don’t have to buy two Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB cards. It’s quite enough to have two ordinary models with 512 megabytes of memory on board. This is confirmed by the results we’ve got in a number of games. But before we make up our final opinion, we want to examine the results of individual tests we got in high display resolutions with enabled 4x FSAA.

As was to be expected, the CrossFire platform is faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in each test, except for the first one, which demands a high fill rate from the graphics card. The results agree with the overall scores although the latter were obtained at a display resolution of 1024x768 without FSAA.