Testbed and Methods

We tested the performance of the ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire series on this platform:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.40GHz, 1MB L2 cache)
• ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 CrossFire Edition (ATI RD480+SB450)
• OCZ PC3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2 x 1GB, CL2-3-2-5)
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, NCQ, 16MB buffer)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W power supply (ELT620AWT, 620W)
• Dell P1130 and Dell P1110 monitors (21”, 1800x1440@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c
• Catalyst 6.1 (with Radeon X1900 support)

Since only nForce4 chipsets officially support Nvidia SLI, the results for two GeForce 7800 GTX SLI graphics cards were obtained on a different testbed:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.40GHz, 1MB L2);
• ASUS A8N32-SLI Premium mainboard (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16);
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2x1GB, CL2-3-2-5);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card;
• Enermax Liberty 620W power supply (ELT620AWT, 620W);
• Dell P1130/Dell P1110 monitors (21”, maximum resolution 1800x1440x75Hz);
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c;
• Nvidia ForceWare 81.98.

We set up the ATI and Nvidia drivers in the same way as always:

ATI Catalyst:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: Off
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• Quality AF: Off
• Other settings: default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Image Settings: Quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: On
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: On
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On
• Transparency antialiasing: Off
• Other settings: default

We select the highest graphics quality settings in each game, identical for graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia, except for the flight sim Pacific Fighters that requires vertex texturing for its SM 3.0 rendering mode. We do not edit the configuration files of the games. If possible, we use the in-game benchmarking tools to record and reproduce a demo and then measure the reproduction speed in frames per second. Otherwise we measure the frame rate with the Fraps utility. If it is possible, we measure minimal as well as average fps rates to give you a fuller picture.

We turn on 4x full-screen antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering in the “eye candy” test mode from the game’s own menu if possible. Otherwise we force the necessary mode from the graphics card driver. If possible, we use the game’s integrated benchmarking tools to record and reproduce a demo and measure the reproduction speed in frames-per-second, and if not, we measure the frame rate with the Fraps utility. We measure minimal as well as average fps rates whenever possible to draw a fuller performance picture.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a second sample of GeForce 7800 GTX 512 and had to use a SLI configuration with two ordinary GeForce 7800 GTX as an opponent to the RADEON X1900 XT CrossFire system.

We tested the following single cards in 4x FSAA + 16x AF mode for the sake of comparison:

• Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB (R580, 650/1550MHz, 48pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 512MB)
• Radeon X1800 XT 512MB (R520, 625/1500MHz, 16pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 512MB) for details see our article called ATI RADEON X1800 XT and XL Performance: Crushing NVIDIA's 7800?
• GeForce 7800 GTX 512 (G70, 550/1700MHz, 24pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 512MB) for details see our article called NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512: Faster, Higher, Stronger !
• GeForce 7800 GTX (G70, 430/1200MHz, 24pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 256MB) for details see our article called NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX: Monstrous Gaming Performance Unleashed .

These games and applications were used as benchmarks:

3D Shooters with First-Person View

• Battlefield 2
• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Call of Duty 2
• Doom 3
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R.
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
• Project Snowblind
• Quake 4
• Serious Sam 2
• Unreal Tournament 2004

3D Shooters with Third-Person View

• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Simulators

• Colin McRae Rally 2005
• Pacific Fighters

Strategies

• Age of Empires 3
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War

Semi-synthetic benchmarks

• Aquamark3

Synthetic benchmarks

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 360
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 120