AnandTech Exclusive: CrossFire Benchmarks Revealed
by Derek Wilson on July 22, 2005 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The System
The GA-K8AMVP Pro is based on the ATI's latest RD480 chipset paired with a ULi south bridge and features CrossFire support. We'll be taking a closer look at this board as well, as Gigabyte tells us that it can even support 2x 3D1 cards. The board looks very similar to Gigabyte's NF4 SLI boards, including the selector paddle for configuring the PCI Express ports. Flipped to single GPU, the first PCI Express slot gets 16 lanes, and flipped to multi GPU mode will run each slot at x8.
The board itself is stable and runs well. We had no problems with the platform while running our tests, and performance seems to be very solid. On this board, the master card had to be plugged into the slot closest to the CPU.
Our CrossFire master card looked very similar to a regular X850 XT. The port furthest from the motherboard connects to the dongle, which plugs into the monitor as well as the port closest to the motherboard on the slave card.
The card really does look a lot like a normal X850 XT, but we can see that the solder points for the Rage Theater chip are missing and there are quite a few components on the board in its place. All this circuitry (along with a couple of surface-mount LEDs) is likely part of the hardware needed to combine the output of both cards for final display. NVIDIA's parts don't need quite as many additional board components, as the GPU has die space committed to multi-chip rendering and all the work is done on the GPU and in the frame buffers.
That's not to say that ATI's solution is less adequate. Since the DVI port is inherently digital, the external dongle does nothing to lower image quality like the old analog dongle that 3dfx used to employ for SLI.
Before we get to the benchmarks, we will note again that with the early hardware and drivers, we had some trouble with some of the games and settings that we wanted to run. We tested most of the games that we ran in our recent 7800 launch article, but we ended up seeing numbers that didn't make sense. We don't have any reason to think that these problems will remain when the product launches, but it does shorten the list of games that we felt gave a good indication of CrossFire's performance.
For our tests, we used numbers from our original 7800 GTX review. The system (except for the motherboard) is the same as the setup used in the 7800 review (FX-55, 1GB 2:2:2 DDR400, 600W PSU, 120GB HD).
And what are our results? Take a look.
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Furen - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
X850 crossfire doesnt seem too apealing in a world with the 7800GTX. This would have been great 6 months ago, or even 3.Cookie Crusher - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
Maybe I was a bit hasty in my disappointment, but still, I expected Ati to come over the top with something special. :(Looks like there will be plenty of battles this coming year between sli and crossfire.
The trick is: who can make their dual card solutions more affordable?
Cookie Crusher - Friday, July 22, 2005 - link
I would have expected a little more than the results posted....but oh well, hurry up already ati.Hasse - Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - link
Nice, Don't know what to say... It's nice to see Anandtech's involvement in the discussion!I'ld like to point that as a halfway gamer I did get rid of a Sony F520 which did 2048x1536 at 85Hz, and it was beautiful and HUGE. It ate all the space on my desktop so when transforming to LCD which uses allmost no space there are a few issues to consider. Like responsetime, colors, artifacts yadda yadda yadda. I found a nice companion in the Nec 2080UX+ which is a 20" 16ms panel, and I have no smearing, no artifacts, vivid colors and last but not least NO lag what so ever..
Apart from that back to topic:
I feel that ATI has made a good effort, while abit late it's still nice from a consumers stand to have competition. What makes me a bit worried is the way ATI made their solution. As a consumer I'ld really not get stucked with a card that REQUIRES a slave card to work at all (correct me if I'm wrong..), that is you cannot run a CrossFire card by itself in a system. Whilst Nvidia's solution is more flexible (you can run your system with either one of the cards used in SLI).
I wonder also if CrossFire will work with cards from different vendors, as that was one of the quirks Nvidia was bothered about (same vendor and bios).
I'm also concerned about how much trouble Anandtech had getting the setup to work properly, ok it's a prerelease, but Giga said it was close to finished... shuld we be worried? Who knows... I've had bad encounters with highend ATI cards in the past, whilst my friends have had few or none. It makes me wonder if CrossFire is having the same trouble with drivers as the "old" drivers had with standard ATI cards....
Lastly, I find it annoying as a consumer to have to buy a more (in case of XT -> Crossfire) expensive card than the one I allready have because the new one also supports the faster XT PE.. (correct me if I'm wrong regarding the cost and so forth...)...
Last.. Despite all my reservations regarding ATI's solution to Nvidia's SLI I'm still very interested in the development, and not least: Will CrossFire also come for R520 (probably, but if they're having this much trouble with x850 how will the new cards fare?)
Thanks for the Article. Kepp up the good work.
Best Regards
Hasse
Hasse - Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - link
And Stupid as I am I pressed reply.. I should have pressed post a new comment.. sorry.-Hasse