Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark03

As we noted in our Radeon X1900 XTX review , 3DMark03 is not a favorable environment for the new graphics card series from ATI to show their best in. The two Radeon X1900 cards working in CrossFire mode perform much alike to the single Radeon X1900 XTX. They are faster, but not very much faster, than the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire system and stop 1613 points short of the 30,000 points mark.

The Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire and the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire are equally fast throughout almost the entire first test which lacks any pixels shaders altogether. The higher clock rates of the Radeon X1900 XTX that plays the role of the Slave in the new CrossFire configuration mean nothing here because the Master card works at the standard frequencies of Radeon X1900 XT. If there’s any performance gain, it is fully negated by the asynchronous frequencies of the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire Edition and the Radeon X1900 XTX.

The second test produces a similar picture: Shader Models 1.1 and 1.4 aren’t anything serious for modern graphics cards, so the GPU and memory frequencies are still the main performance-influencing factors, especially when extreme antialiasing modes are in use.