ATI's X8xx CrossFire Graphics Arrive

Gaming Performance

We have already taken a look into gaming performance under CrossFire when Gigabyte sent us some preproduction samples. We reran the numbers on ATI's final boards and drivers and here is what we ended up with.

The numbers with no AA show CrossFire doing very well; even beating the 7800 GTX SLI in the very CPU limited Halflife 2. A bigger deal is that the X850 CrossFire actually outperformed the single 7800 GTX in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Doom 3 generally favors NVIDIA hardware, and while the CrossFire setup can't match the 6800 Ultra SLI, it performs on par with the 7800 GTX. Battlefield 2 is a close race between the 6800 Ultra SLI and the X850 CrossFire setups.









With AA enabled, CrossFire performs similarly well. The 7800 GTX SLI beats it in Halflife 2 this time around (even though both parts are still essentially CPU limited), and CrossFire gains ground on the NVIDIA parts. The performance impact of AA on NVIDIA hardware is slightly greater than on ATI hardware. The AA quality of ATI hardware is also better. Again Battlefield 2 is a close race, with a leadership changes favoring CrossFire.









For those who wish to look back at our previous CrossFire article, you will quickly see that the CrossFire results have not changed much at all. The biggest difference here is Halflife 2 where CrossFire was already a stellar performer.

We didn't publish the results in the last article, but Battlefield 2 is now performing better having moved away from SuperTiling. The results before were not that bad, but we definitely see better numbers this time around.