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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rjm55 - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
It seems silly to moan that you can't test higher than 1600x1200. Reality is 19" flat panels are reasonable and a hot buy right now - and they do 1280x1024. To get higher res you have to go at leasr 20" at TWICE the price for 1600x1200 maximum res. Except for the wide scren res blips of 1920 x1200 in the 24" category, the next big jump is at a 30" LCD with the Apple Cinema 30 doing 2560x1600.The point is 1600x1200 or the slightly higher 1920x1200 wide screen is the realistic limit for current LCD displays. It might be nice to know 7800 SLI works more efficiently at 2560x1600 but this is mostly academic since most readers here don't have a 30" Apple Cinema (we all know Anand does).
For me I was very impressed that the ATI chipset and ATI Crossfire more than held their own compared to nVidia even in this preview setup. I'm looking forward to Crossfire chipset tests and overclocking tests to see if this is my next AMD chipset for a nVidia 7800. The nF4 stills seems way too flakey to me and everything I read says the new ATI chipsets run and overclock like a dream. Bring on some chipset results.
jkostans - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
This reminds me of when ATI released the 9700 pro, except they are taking the beating this time. They will recover, these companies always seem to. I think the R520 is going to suprise many people, they are keeping awful quite about it. Also, rememebr that ati is an expert at staying alive with sub-par high-end cards (radeon 8500 and before). The low-end cards are what keeps these companies alive anyways, look at how many pre-built systems have an X300 in them.....Jalf - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Why didn't the article look at how much of a relative improvement X-Fire gives compared to SLI?Yes, Crossfire beats the 6800 SLI in HL2, but what does that mean? A single X850 card beats a single 6800 in that game too.
But 6800 SLI gives a 22% improvement over single-card SLI, while X850 Crossfire only gives roughly half that. (in the no-AA HL2 test. Too lazy to work out all the figures)
Isn't that where it gets interesting? It's no big surprise that two fast cards beats two slightly slower cards, but knowing which multi-card technology provides the biggest boost over single-card speeds, would be a lot more relevant.
Myrandex - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
It is pretty sweet that ATI has nvidia SLI working, and dual 3D1 support. Quad GF6600's sound pretty sweet (or Quad 7800's w/ Asus's solution).Jason
smn198 - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Xfire does give a good % increase over a single card which is promising for ATI's next generation assuming that it will be competitive with the 7800 series. Shame that the current performance doesn't look that good compared to 7800 SLI.gibhunter - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
SLI is a waste of money when you can buy a 7800GTX for $550 at newegg. The increase in power requirements, setup headaches, AA headaches is simply not worth it when you get basically the same kind of performance from a single card.Still, it's good that they have implemented the technology, then again it's completely asynine to require a special, more expensive card to have it running. SLI is cheaper.
Finally, it's stupid to buy this setup just so you can run at 2048/1536 with 4X AA. No one with that kind of cash, runs on an old crt. Everyone with that kind of money has an LCD that's either 1280/1024 or 1600/1200 and for those, a single setup based on the 7800GTX is the cheaper and more reliable solution...unless you're an ATI fanboy. If so, then go waste your cash.
shabby - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Looks good, but when will it hit retail... when pigs fly?GhandiInstinct - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
ATi is worrying me a bit.They're losing customers everyday to the 7800, shouldn't they tease us who haven't converted just a bit so we know they're still alive out there?
Send us a teaser spec or something please!
Johnmcl7 - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
It's a real shame ATi didn't launch their X8xx series crossfire six months ago as #3 says, just seems a waste of time now, roll on R520.John
PeteRoy - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Crossfire will not be what ATI profits from, it needs more value fast cards like Nvidia 6600GT and 6200