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ATI RADEON X850 CrossFire – Faster than GeForce 7800 GTX

ATI CrossFire Benchmarks Published

by Anton Shilov

[ 07/25/2005 | 03:01 AM ]

The formal launch of ATI CrossFire multi-GPU technology took place over two months ago and the commercial release of appropriate hardware was promised to be scheduled by this time then. Right now there is no CrossFire on the market and it is still unclear how efficient the technology is. AnandTech web-site has managed to obtain suitable CrossFire graphics cards and mainboard in order to pull the wraps off ATI’s multi-GPU technology performance.

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The web-site ran into multiple issues with the CrossFire setup due to the fact that the hardware used was not final. Six modern games – Doom III, Everquest 2, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Unreal Tournament 2004 – were used for testing. Even though in all of those benchmarks ATI’s CrossFire delivered significant performance improvement, the web-site noted that neither high-quality full-scene antialiasing, nor rendering modes different from SuperTiling could be enabled. Furthermore, multi-GPU RADEON X850 setup does not deliver tangibly higher performance compared to the GeForce 7800 GTX.

“While CrossFire often provides more performance than the 7800 GTX, we don't get the benefit of SM3.0, which is being used in more and more games. The added cost will either eat into your budget for a next generation card when they come along, or will usurp money that might be better spent on a monitor to handle very high resolutions,” AnandTech claims.

“The bottom line is that CrossFire is a success in implementation. We are impressed with the performance of the solution, especially considering the very early hardware and software that we have our hands on here. When a final solution is released, we will be doing a much more in-depth performance and image quality analysis of the hardware, but at this point, we just want to get a solid idea about what to expect,” the web-site believes.