Friday, June 3, 2005

Web-Site Reveals ATI RADEON X850 CrossFire Benchmark Results. ATI’s CrossFire Runs on Par with NVIDIA SLI in Doom III, Web-Site Claims

8:12 am | Anton Shilov

UPDATE: Changing source of the news-story.

Danish web-site HardInfo.dk revealed benchmarks of ATI CrossFire system featuring two RADEON X850-series graphics cards hours after ATI Technologies demonstrated its record-breaking 3DMark05 score at Computex Taipei 2005.

Surprisingly, ATI’s CrossFire could outperform NVIDIA GeForce 6 SLI not only in 3DMark05, but also can slightly leave the rival behind in Doom III, where ATI RADEON X800-based graphics cards have traditionally been significantly slower than competing offerings from NVIDIA Corp., according to the benchmarks, which the web-site claims to be of its own.

The web-site said it used AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 processor along with DFI RD482 mainboard and Gigabyte GA K8N Ultra-9 mainboard for ATI RADEON X850 XT CrossFire and NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI pairs respectively. The testbed was said to be equipped with 1GB of Corsair PC3200 memory with CL2 2-2-6 settngs. HardInfo.dk said it used CATALYST 5.4 and ForceWare 71.89 drivers for testing.

ATI RADEON X850 XT CrossFire combination of two graphics cards could score 10 637 marks in default mode at default clock-speeds in 3DMark05 benchmark. The web-site, for some reason, did not publish results of NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra in this benchmark.

In Doom III with 1024x768 setting without any eye-candy, ATI RADEON X850 XT CrossFire scores 20% higher framerate (85.4 fps vs. 70.7 fps) over RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition (PE). The benchmark result may imply that either a new driver was used, or different graphics cards were set to different image quality, as the RADEON X850 XT PE typically cannot outperform the GeForce 6800 GT in Doom III, according to X-bit labs’ performance tests using CATALYST 5.4 drivers.

With 1024x768 resolution as well as FSAA 4x and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled in Doom III, ATI RADEON X850 XT CrossFire is 78% faster (69.6 fps vs. 39.1 fps) than a single RADEON X850 XT PE graphics card. When resolution was set to 1280x769 and eye-candy enabled, dual RADEON X850 XT could deliver 89% improvement (52.2 fps vs. 27.6 fps) over lone RADEON X850 XP PE in the Doom III game. Only in the most graphically intensive Doom III test case NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800-series GPUs in dual- and single-GPU modes slightly outperformed competing ATI RADEON X8 solutions.

Given that benchmarks were performed on unknown drivers in unidentified conditions, such results should be considered carefully and should not be regarded as final for the products mentioned.

• HardInfo.dk: ATI CrossFire vs. NVIDIA SLI, Performance Exposed.
• X-bit labs: ATI Crosses the Swords: Multi-GPU CrossFire Technology Previewed.

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