Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2

Like with the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire, we couldn’t make the game run in extreme full-screen antialiasing modes, so there are no numbers for Super AA/SLI AA 8x/14x/16x.

The traditional “eye candy” mode is rather too easy here to become a serious trial for modern multi-GPU configurations.

In 1600x1200 the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire platform is somewhat faster than the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire, but the performance seems to be limited by the texture fetch speed. This small advantage, however, confirms the status of the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire as of the highest-performing multi-GPU graphics subsystem among the tested ones.

The Chronicles of Riddick

The Radeon X1900 XT brings about a noticeable performance increase over the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire, but it is also clear that the speed of this game doesn’t scale up too readily on the Radeon X1000 architecture.

Note that there’s a very small gain over the single graphics card within the Radeon X1900 series. This is expectable, though, since The Chronicles of Riddick uses the OpenGL API and stencil shadows rather than the shadow mapping technique.

Note also that the multi-GPU configurations as well as the single GeForce 7800 GTX 512 all ensure a comfortable frame rate in this game.

The new solution is on top in the Super AA 8x mode, almost making 1280x1024 resolution playable. The speed gain over the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire isn’t too big here, again, since the clock rates of the two CrossFire platforms differ but very little.

Not too many changes as we switch over to the more resource-consuming Super AA 14x mode. Why? It is the memory subsystem load that is higher here, and the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire and the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire have near the same memory subsystem performance. The resolution of 1024x768 pixels is available for play, but would you want to use it on an ultra high-end gaming computer which is sure to be equipped with a 19-21” monitor?