F.E.A.R.

ATI CrossFire technology is not as efficient here as Nvidia SLI. Moreover, the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire is slower than the single Radeon X1900 XTX in the first two resolutions! We can’t find a good reason for this behavior since the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire ensures a small but stable performance gain in comparison with the single Radeon X1800 XT. The two graphics cards may have got out of sync due to the difference in the clock rates of the Radeon X1900 XTX and Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire Edition.

It’s all different in the Super AA 8x mode. The Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire has a slightly worse minimum speed than the Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire, but has a much higher average frame rate, too. The speed gain varies from 20 to 60%. The resolution of 1280x1024 pixels seems to be playable, but the speed may bottom out to 21fps, so you may have some slowdowns even playing the game on a CrossFire pair of Radeon X1900 cards.

The Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire is over 40% faster than the previous multi-GPU platform, Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire, even in 1024x768 resolution. The average performance of about 60fps in 1024x768 allows playing F.E.A.R. comfortably with enabled 14x Super AA which is an achievement indeed.

On the other hand, the min frame rate is no higher than 23fps and, moreover, this low resolution will hardly be called for in a gaming computer of that class. Anyway, these results make us hope the 96 pixel processors may bring about a considerable performance gain in shader rich applications. In other words, the future perspectives of the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire look bright indeed.