ATI MultiGPU Done Right: The Radeon X1800 CrossFire Edition
by Derek Wilson on December 20, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
ATI: The A is for Availability?
Let's just say that we haven't been happy with ATI's promises of availability as of late. Generally speaking, we would often be promised availability for a certain date, and generally speaking that date would come and go, with nothing to show for it (definitely not in the sense of actual availability).
We and pretty much the rest of the press that ATI works with have been hounding ATI, demanding some accountability on their statements to us of availability. Because frankly, if we can't believe what they're telling us and you can't believe what they're telling us, then there's a serious problem. We've got some trust issues with ATI at this point, and luckily they seem intent on resolving them.
We've talked to ATI numerous times about availability, and prior to today's launch we had another discussion with them about the problem. They have promised that they have taken steps and precautions, internally, to once and for all resolve these availability problems. They stressed the difficulty of aligning a product launch with availability that very same day, but we countered with the fact that if they can put 330 million transistors to good use on a GPU, they can figure out how to make shipments arrive on time.
This latest launch is sort of a proving ground for our relationship with ATI, mainly with whether or not we can trust what they tell us. According to ATI, due to a customs issue, the shipments of CrossFire Edition X1800 cards were delayed from reaching the US last week. For this reason, ATI pushed the launch date back to today in order to follow through on their promise of a hard launch. In other words, today we should absolutely expect to be able to buy the CrossFire Edition X1800.
There's not much we can do other than wait and see, let's hope for ATI's sake that there is actual availability, in real quantities, sometime today. We will be keeping a close eye on what's happening with availability throughout the day, but right now let's find out if the X1800 CrossFire Edition is something worth buying to begin with.
Let's just say that we haven't been happy with ATI's promises of availability as of late. Generally speaking, we would often be promised availability for a certain date, and generally speaking that date would come and go, with nothing to show for it (definitely not in the sense of actual availability).
We and pretty much the rest of the press that ATI works with have been hounding ATI, demanding some accountability on their statements to us of availability. Because frankly, if we can't believe what they're telling us and you can't believe what they're telling us, then there's a serious problem. We've got some trust issues with ATI at this point, and luckily they seem intent on resolving them.
We've talked to ATI numerous times about availability, and prior to today's launch we had another discussion with them about the problem. They have promised that they have taken steps and precautions, internally, to once and for all resolve these availability problems. They stressed the difficulty of aligning a product launch with availability that very same day, but we countered with the fact that if they can put 330 million transistors to good use on a GPU, they can figure out how to make shipments arrive on time.
This latest launch is sort of a proving ground for our relationship with ATI, mainly with whether or not we can trust what they tell us. According to ATI, due to a customs issue, the shipments of CrossFire Edition X1800 cards were delayed from reaching the US last week. For this reason, ATI pushed the launch date back to today in order to follow through on their promise of a hard launch. In other words, today we should absolutely expect to be able to buy the CrossFire Edition X1800.
There's not much we can do other than wait and see, let's hope for ATI's sake that there is actual availability, in real quantities, sometime today. We will be keeping a close eye on what's happening with availability throughout the day, but right now let's find out if the X1800 CrossFire Edition is something worth buying to begin with.
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almvtb - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link
Has anyone ever compared SLI and crossfire performance using a dual core compared to just a single core cpu? I mean if there is enough overhead for sli or crossfire a dual core chip could improve performance.kristof007 - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link
I don't know if that dual core thing would work. I mean it might but the two slower CPUs would not help in my opinion. Games are single threaded so the multi CPU wouldn't take off the overhead .. at least that's my knowledge of it.almvtb - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link
See I thought that was a big deal with one of the latest Nvidia driver releases. That it was made multithreaded so that in a situation such as when you have sli or any other kind of driver overhead it would be taken care of by the a second core if one existed. I do not know it was just a thought that i had never seen discussed, so I thought I would ask.bob661 - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link
That was an ATI driver release that had the multithreading stuff, I think.kilkennycat - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link
We shall shortly soon find out whether Crossfire is serious or just a ATi marketing straw-grabbing ploy to get some suckers (er, "enthusiasts") not to buy SLI. If the compositor is fully integrated into EVERY R580 GPU, (thus never requiring a masterboard and implementing the board communications via a passive bridge a la nVidia) then we shall finally know that ATI is serious with Crossfire. It was probably a stupid cheese-pairing management decision not to integrate the Crossfire functionality fully into the R520 GPU, or else Crossfire does not have enthusiastic support from ATI engineering and is purely a ATi marketing ploy anyway. The R580 details will reveal the truth.Spacecomber - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link
What changed since the http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2466...">Battlefield 2 GPU Performance Analysis article? It seemed like you were able to demonstrate the advantages of SLI in those benchmarks.Space
bob661 - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link
I think AT has a different benchmark now for BF2.Spacecomber - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link
As far as I know the only thing that has changed along the way are the addition of BF2 patches (according to the overclocking the Athlon X2 article, they are up to using the 1.03 patch) and newer nvidia drivers. I believe they are still creating a demo and running it with the timedemo option. With this being such a popular game (BF2), it seems like it would be worthwhile to confirm whether SLI/Crossfire does or does not offer significant improvements for BF2.ViRGE - Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - link
Ya, DICE seems to screw up demos with new BF2 patches.ElFenix - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link
i wonder if you can change b&w2's name to make the score go up as well. maybe there is poor optimization going on in the catalyst AI?