Performance in Strategy Games

Age of Empires 3

CrossFire technology couldn’t produce correct results in this game in the Super AA mode, so we don’t publish them here.

The efficiency of the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire configuration grows up along with the display resolution. There’s almost no advantage over the single Radeon X1900 XTX in 1024x768, but then it amounts to as much as 50% in 1600x1200. The GeForce 7800 GTX SLI is thus left behind by 2fps.

A SLI configuration with two GeForce 7800 GTX 512 would probably be faster than the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire, but we can’t yet check this out as we don’t have a second sample of that card.

Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War

The Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire is quite noticeably behind the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire – by about 10%. We don’t have a clear explanation but we suspect it is due to desynchronization between the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire Edition and the Radeon X1900 XTX. As for performance, the GeForce 7800 GTX SLI has better results than the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire due to its UltraShadow technology and more efficient processing of textures.

The results of the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire and the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire almost coincide. Although the multi-GPU systems from ATI are slightly ahead of the GeForce 7800 GTX SLI in the extreme antialiasing modes, the latter ensures a higher minimum frame rate, so the player runs a lower risk of experiencing slowdowns during play.

There’s a somewhat bigger gap between the two CrossFire systems in the Super AA 14x mode. They are both ahead of the Nvidia solution, but the latter offers a higher minimum frame rate even though works in the more resource-consuming SLI AA 16x mode. The 29-44fps range provided by the two GeForce 7800 GTX is better to have in this case than the 17-49fps range from the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire.

The scalability problems with Radeon X1800 CrossFire and Radeon X1900 CrossFire must be due to insufficiently fast texture fetches as they have only 32 texture-mapping units against 48 in the GeForce 7800 GTX.