CrossFire Xpress 3200: RD580 for AM2
by Wesley Fink on June 1, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
CrossFire Gaming Performance
Both major players in the Video Market now have flagship Dual X16 solutions. SLI and CrossFire are about gaming, so CrossFire tests were confined to gaming benchmarks, and the test suite is heavily slanted to recent and popular titles where SLI and CrossFire make the biggest difference. All CrossFire testing was at 1600x1200, 4X AA, and 8X AF. Tests were also run with a single X1900 XT at this same resolution. The single video high-res results on the ATI AM2 are in Orange and the CrossFire results are in Red.
You might think you are looking at results from different video cards in CrossFire/SLI performance. Here leads are larger and positions are often switched from results at standard resolution without the eye candy. ATI CrossFire is the clear winner in Serous Sam 2, COD2, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, while NVIDIA SLI owns Half Life 2 and F.E.A.R. We suspect part of these multi-GPU results revolve around which card has the best optimized drivers available.
We complained about ATI's CrossFire interface in our last two CrossFire reviews, and it still remains clumsy and anything but intuitive. To use CrossFire you MUST install Catalyst Control Center. If CCC is not installed CrossFire will not work. Since many users don't install CCC this is anything but an intuitive solution for CrossFire. Once installed, you must go into CCC, select the CrossFire tab and enable the feature. This is a MANUAL procedure - there is no warning at all that you have a CrossFire capable board or that you have to go into CCC to enable CrossFire. NVIDIA warns you that an SLI-capable system is installed and prompts you to enable SLI. There is no warning at all with ATI. The only clue you will have that CrossFire is NOT turned in is the poor performance results. THEN you start looking for what's wrong. ATI really needs to fix this issue. CrossFire performance is very good, but it would be much nicer if ATI made it easier to turn on CrossFire.
Both major players in the Video Market now have flagship Dual X16 solutions. SLI and CrossFire are about gaming, so CrossFire tests were confined to gaming benchmarks, and the test suite is heavily slanted to recent and popular titles where SLI and CrossFire make the biggest difference. All CrossFire testing was at 1600x1200, 4X AA, and 8X AF. Tests were also run with a single X1900 XT at this same resolution. The single video high-res results on the ATI AM2 are in Orange and the CrossFire results are in Red.
You might think you are looking at results from different video cards in CrossFire/SLI performance. Here leads are larger and positions are often switched from results at standard resolution without the eye candy. ATI CrossFire is the clear winner in Serous Sam 2, COD2, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, while NVIDIA SLI owns Half Life 2 and F.E.A.R. We suspect part of these multi-GPU results revolve around which card has the best optimized drivers available.
We complained about ATI's CrossFire interface in our last two CrossFire reviews, and it still remains clumsy and anything but intuitive. To use CrossFire you MUST install Catalyst Control Center. If CCC is not installed CrossFire will not work. Since many users don't install CCC this is anything but an intuitive solution for CrossFire. Once installed, you must go into CCC, select the CrossFire tab and enable the feature. This is a MANUAL procedure - there is no warning at all that you have a CrossFire capable board or that you have to go into CCC to enable CrossFire. NVIDIA warns you that an SLI-capable system is installed and prompts you to enable SLI. There is no warning at all with ATI. The only clue you will have that CrossFire is NOT turned in is the poor performance results. THEN you start looking for what's wrong. ATI really needs to fix this issue. CrossFire performance is very good, but it would be much nicer if ATI made it easier to turn on CrossFire.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
71 Comments
View All Comments
Gary Key - Thursday, June 1, 2006 - link
Wes's original hard drive met an untimely death during testing. However, the chart is incorrect as the Maxtor drive has a 16MB cache also and in our IPEAK tests the two drives are very comparable if not the same. We did not see any differences in the game scores and PCMark was off about 20 points, well within the margin of error for testing for this application.