Introducing the Radeon X1650 XT: A New Mainstream GPU from ATI

CrossFire Performance

The X1650 XT is the second card with the new ATI CrossFire features. With the X1950 Pro, ATI got rid of the annoying dongle connector for good, and they have adopted a very NVIDIA-like approach, with small bridge connections on the top of the cards for CrossFire operation. We think this was a wise choice for ATI and applaud them for it.

We were curious what kind of CrossFire performance we would see with the Radeon X1650 XT, particularly in comparison with the GeForce 7600 GT in SLI mode. Again, since the 7600 GT is the X1650 XT's main competitor, how these cards perform in CrossFire and SLI was something we wanted to take a look at. We've also included some other cards for reference, and we've chosen a few of the same tests from our performance section for comparison.

CrossFire Performance Battlefield 2

The first test is in Battlefield 2 with 4X AA enabled.



In Battlefield 2, we see that with CrossFire we get a 55%-59% improvement in frame rate with the X1650 XT over single card operation. The performance of two of these cards in CrossFire (in this game) is comparable to a single X1950 Pro (or a 7900 GT or 7950 GT on the NVIDIA side). We can also see that the 7600 GT SLI gets slightly better performance than the X1650 XT in each of the resolutions. This is something we've seen in the past: in many instances, SLI provides better performance scaling than CrossFire. Here the 7600 GT SLI configuration performs 80%-90% better. Hopefully ATI can improve the efficiency of CrossFire more in the future.

CrossFire Performance Oblivion

For our Oblivion CrossFire tests, we again used 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200, omitting 1920x1440 because most cards can't run the game at this resolution.



We noticed an issue during our Oblivion SLI and CrossFire tests with the 7600 GT in SLI mode. There appears to be only a very tiny increase in performance when running two of these cards in SLI mode over a single 7600 GT. We aren't exactly sure why this is, but Oblivion is definitely a very graphically demanding game, and ATI hardware tends to perform better with this game. This fact is very evident when we look at the kind of increase we see in performance on the graph above with the X1650 XT in CrossFire mode over a single card. At 1600x1200 we see about a 68% increase in performance with the CrossFire X1650 XT setup over the single X1650 XT. Having two of these cards in CrossFire mode will definitely allow you to crank up the settings in the game more, if you plan to go that route.

For now, we would disregard 7600 GT SLI performance in Oblivion as there appears to be a driver glitch at play. 7900 GS SLI scores 83%-88% higher than a single 7900 GS, so the <10% improvement seen on the 7600 GT SLI cards is clearly incorrect. We are investigating the matter further. X1650 XT will likely fall slightly behind 7600 GT SLI if we see a similar SLI improvement, however, as CrossFire only improves X1650 XT performance 62%-75% and the single X1650 XT is basically tied with a single 7600 GT.

CrossFire Performance Half-Life 2 Episode one

Lastly, we looked at Half-Life 2 Episode one with 4xaa enabled.



Here we see the 7600 GT SLI and X1650 XT CrossFire are back to being much closer to each other in performance (than with Oblivion) but this time the X1650 XT CrossFire gets a little better performance than the 7600 GT in the two higher resolutions; 1600x1200 and 1920x1440. Again we see that the performance of the X1650 XT in CrossFire mode is very similar to the X1950 Pro, and consequently, the latter card might be a better option that buying two X1650 XT cards to run in CrossFire.

CrossFire is something we wanted to look at for this launch, but generally speaking, it won't be a very practical option for use with this card. CrossFire requires a motherboard with two PCIe X16 slots which tends to be pricey, so if you are in the market for a system that is capable of this, you most likely aren't looking to get two cards of the performance of an X1650 XT; more likely you are looking to get the biggest and best. The performance of two cheaper cards in CrossFire or SLI operation is usually about equal to the performance of what it would cost to get a single faster card at the same price. Sure, it may look impressive, but it usually means more hardware, more power consumption, and more general headaches than you would get with a single card. Oblivion didn't have any performance anomalies with single GPUs, you will notice....