AMD's CrossFireX: Tri & Quad GPU Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 21, 2008 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Drivers
Make no mistake, we are dealing with the earliest drivers AMD was willing to let out of its control - in other words we should expect bugs.
Much like our Radeon HD 3870 X2 experience, CrossFireX just worked. Switching between 2, 3 and 4 GPUs did require a driver reinstall for things to work perfectly but once we ticked that little CrossFire checkbox everything worked as it should.
CrossFireX: Don't Feed After Midnight
The rules for CrossFireX are simple: you can make any combination of up to 4 RV670 based GPUs, using either Radeon HD 3850s, 3870s or 3870 X2s. Note that the upper limit is two Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards (4 GPUs).
While the clock speeds aren't normalized to the slowest card in the arrangement, the faster cards will have to wait on slower cards so ideally you'd want to pair similarly clocked GPUs.
Two Radeon HD 3870 X2s in action
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Spacecomber - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
Having recently read the preview of the 9600GT at Anandtech, one of the things that stood out from that article was how SLI seemed to do better than Crossfire on the games that were tested. Crysis was the only game that was used in both this article and that one, and 3850's were run in Crossfire for the earlier article, not 3870's. Nevertheless, it looks like Crossfire performance gains going from 1 to 2 ATI cards is now on a par (with the new AMD/ATI drivers) with going from 1 to 2 Nvidia cards.Perhaps this will prove to be the reason for AMD/ATI selecting the tests they did in this preview. CrossfireX does about as well SLI on these particular games?
(Though we'll not see the results, we know that Derek is trying these new ATI drivers out on his Skulltrail system, if it's possible. ;-) )
Zoomer - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
Are you allowed to only test these games, or allowed to publish and talk about these games only?I don't see how ATi can enforce such a requirement. *cough* ghost *cough*
Wirmish - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
PC Perspective also test the beta-CrossFire-X.Their system is identical, except for the hard disk.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=523&type=...">http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=523&type=...
RÉSULTS:
Bioshock
Anand (0xAA/0xAF) -> 2=63, 3=87, 4=93
PCPer (0xAA/8xAF) -> 2=65, 3=84, 4=92
Call of Duty 4
Anand (4xAA/16xAF) -> 2=50, 3=72, 4=93
PCPer (4xAA/ 8xAF) -> 2=43, 3=56, 4=64
Unreal Tournament 3
Anand (0xAA/16xAF) -> 2=84, 3=113, 4=115
PCPer (0xAA/ 8xAF) -> 2=58, 3=54, 4=58
How do you explain these results ?
POWER CONSUMPTION - ENTIRE SYSTEM
Anand (Bioshock) -> 2=361W, 3=406W, 4=538W
PCPer (CoD 4) ----> 2=407W, 3=527W, 4=663W
Why didn't you choose the hungriest game to calculate the consumption of the system ?
Paracelsus - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
You've listed the 4-way CF over 1 card gain as 268%.It should be 368%. (95.2/25.3 = 3.68)
The numbers are confusing, comparing 3-way to 2-way etc. Why do that, makes more sense to compare 3-way to 1-way. Then it's easy to compare to the perfect scaling of 200, 300, 400%.
mechwarrior1989 - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
I got confused by it to but the Test Bench isn't what they listed on the page. Either that's a Typo or that's just supposed to refer to the Nvidia Benchmark that they did with the Tri-SLIkalrith - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
Yeah, it looks like they entered the test setup from the Nvidia article rather than the one used in this article. It would make sense if they entered both test setups but not to completely exclude the AMD setup used for most of the tests.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
Woops :) Fixed :)Take care,
Anand
Arbie - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
Good catch for Anandtech! AMD told you it was a Phenom board but you saw it was really a QX9650. The company must be in dire straits to try a trick like that. Sad.donkeycrock - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
The graph is the best and most effective one i've seen in anybody's review in a long time. cheers and well donebrunis - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
Hi, alot of people are still playing WoW, me included. I just bought the Samsung 245B, a wide 24" screen. I'd love to see a cpu+gpu update for the wow guide. If i should invest in an extra 8800GTS or a new Core2 or AMD Phenom cpu.
regards,
Brunis