AnandTech Exclusive: CrossFire Benchmarks Revealed
by Derek Wilson on July 22, 2005 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
So, what have we learned? CrossFire is a solid competitor to SLI at the high end. The hardware and drivers are far enough along to provide very good performance on quite a few titles. SuperTiling works using 32x32 blocks and doesn't seem to have any problems other than the odd glitch while changing modes. CrossFire AA modes don't work quite yet, but games will run and something near what should be there shows up.Gigabyte has stated that they not only have NVIDIA SLI working on their GA-K8AMVP Pro, but that dual 3D1 cards will work as well (with a modified BIOS and driver at the moment). We haven't had a chance yet to test this ourselves, but we will definitely have something up on the combination as soon as we can.
There are some downsides, however. 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. There are plenty of examples of CPU limited games at 1600x1200 using CrossFire (basically the same list as the 7800 GTX). As time goes on, it will be important to invest in a monitor or money spent on ultra high end graphics solutions will go to waste.
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. And right now, we expect exciting things for ATI. To recap performance, we've put together a table showing improvement due to the addition of a second GPU under CrossFire and SLI.
| Multi GPU % Performance Improvement (16x12 noAA) | |||||
| Doom 3 | Everquest 2 | Half-Life 2 | Splinter Cell 3 | UT 2004 | |
| CrossFire | 42.9 | 2.3 | 11.1 | 82.3 | 5.7 |
| SLI | 34 | 1.4 | 22.2 | 88.8 | 4.4 |
| Multi GPU % Performance Improvement (16x12 4xAA) | |||
| Doom 3 | Half-Life 2 | Splinter Cell 3 | |
| CrossFire | 70.6 | 29.9 | 83.8 |
| SLI | 81.3 | 68.2 | 33.6 |
Clearly, even in it's early stages, CrossFire can bring some good competition to SLI.
If ATI can get their chipset out there alongside CrossFire master cards, we could see some good adoption. Their new chipsets are no slouches (well, maybe the southbridge is a little lacking). What is very clear is that ATI needs to get a solution out as soon as possible. Time isn't standing still for ATI while the 7800 GTX is out with zero competition in a single slot.
Once again, we would very much like to thank Gigabyte for providing us with the hardware necessary to run these tests. We were very happy with the performance of their hardware, and will have a more in-depth look at the motherboard as soon as possible.
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CP5670 - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
It depends on the person. I can notice a considerable amount of ghosting in a fast paced game like UT2004 even on an 8ms LCD.I would never go with an LCD for any kind of gaming for a number of reasons, but anyway I got a top notch CRT a month ago and don't need to worry about LCD limitations for a couple of years at least.
Guspaz - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
I'm a laptop gamer. I've got an older Mobility Radeon 9700 Pro, so I can't run everything at the native screen size of 1400x1050. As such there are many games that I play at 1024x768, or even 800x600 in the more extreme cases.Games look just fine with modern LCD scaling. That is to say, a 1024x768 game looks very good scaled up to 1400x1050. When ATI was designing their scaling algo, they obviously focused on making the pixels look square, rather than just doing a simple bilinear transform.
The point of scaling on LCDs may be moot to serious gamers though, as modern desktop cards often don't need to run games at below native res. And when they do, I can report they still look good scaled up.
I can also report that the response rate ("motion blur") is totally overblown. I've got a laptop, which obviously means I've got a pretty high response time (Probably 25ms to 30ms). Motion blur is noticeable, but isn't really distracting except in very bright areas. Desktop LCDs have improved a great deal beyond this with significantly lower response times to the point where it isn't an issue at all. I understand contrast ratios have also improved. All that is really left is colour saturation/accuracy (as a thing that CRTs are better at).
Most gamers I know with modern PCs have LCDs now. CRTs are dying, slowly but surely, much like DVDs slowly replaced VHS. LCDs already outsell CRTs, and adoption among gamers is possibly even higher than the regular computer buying public.
jkostans - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
#23 no serious gamer would play in a window, and how can you not see the drawback of shrinking the screen size to get a lower resolution? Why turn a 19" display into a 14" display? I'm sorry but my 21" crt can do any resolution and still use all of the screen space and not interpolate. LCDs can't period and that's a big deal for 99% of gamers. Oh and #21, CRTs will be around until there is a technology that is fit to take its place. LCD panels are not even close to the quality of a good CRT display.blwest - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Can we do this benchmark on a NON ATI chipset?Samadhi - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
This article shows the need for a lot more reviews of high resolution LCD devices from a gaming perspective.fungmak - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Anand or Derek - two quick questionsWhats the configuration of the slave and master card. Is it an XT as master and XT PE as the slave?
Obviously the speedup for crossfire would be a little bit more if you just used regular XTs instead of XT PEs for the single, if it was just two crossfired XTs.
Finally, in the Far Cry benchmarks, the single ATi card is labelled as the XT, but in the others, the single ATi card is an XT PE. Is this a typo?
Sea Shadow - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Seems like they were CPU limiting most of the benches, only 1600x1200 isnt demanding that much from the 6800 Ultras, x850s, and 7800s in SLI.BuddyHolly - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
This is not quite a paper launch, but more like a paper review. Almost useless in helping me decide what my next video purchase will be other than to show that Crossfire does in fact work.How about the important stuff? When will it ship? How much? And where is the next generation ATI card and when will it ship?
I want more competition so I can retire my 9800pro and get a PCIe card, motherboard and processor without having to morgage my house or go without eating for a month...
Shodan2k - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
To Derek WilsonWhich ATi driver did you use for the CrossFire setup?
yacoub - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
So the point of this is that Crossfire with two last-gen GPUs (XT850s) doesn't perform quite as highly as SLI with two current-gen GPUs (7800s)? That makes sense. If/when the next-gen (current-gen) ATI cards are released I would expect them to do as well or better when Crossfire'd compared to SLI'd 7800GTXs. We shall see. :)