Sneak Peek at ATi's CrossFire Graphics System

Kez writes "While at Computex in Taipei HEXUS.net grabbed some benchmarks of an ATi CrossFire powered system. They have since had the chance to reconstruct a similar system and perform the same benchmarks with other cards and configurations to give us an idea of how CrossFire will perform. Obviously, CrossFire's performance will almost certainly change before release time, but in the very least the article provides an idea of what to expect. Interestingly, from these tests it looks like Nvidia's SLI may remain top-dog for graphics performance."

Comments

Wait and see

[Radicode]

That motherboard they used for testing looks like a monster! 8 sata connectors... I don't want to think about the noise produced by 8 HDs spinning.

Anyway, as with any ATI products... it's better to wait for the final before declaring it a winner or a loser. I tested many beta revisions of their TV wonder USB2 and I saw the performances change with every release, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

-Radicode

Available in SGI Prism systems?

[CyricZ]

Are these cards compatible with SGI Prism systems? The current SGI Prism systems appear to include a ATI FireGL card.

http://www.sgi.com/products/visualization/prism/

Bias?

[LTC_Kilgore]

In the last test (3DMark05 - 1280x1024 4xAA 16xAF), they are running the Nvidia cards at 4x Anti-Aliasing, while the ATI cards are running at 6x.

Re:Bias?

[MightyPez]

At first glance that is always the conclusuon people draw. But Nvidia and ATI do different methods of anti-aliasing depending on the the level that is chosen. In Nvidia's case they use super-sampling, multi-sampling, and sometimes both. ATI uses multi-sampling only. The result is the same level of AA on each card will produce different visual results.

This article goes into depth about the FSAA issue between ATI and Nvidia. Look at page 12 and beyond for the full poop.

Re:Bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Nvidia cards CAN run that 6x mode, it's ATI only. Perhaps these were driver defaults? As in, the driver defaults one is supposed to have set for "official" 3dMark tests?

Re:Bias?

[DeathByDuke]

Why not? Cos ATi cards are more efficient at FSAA than nvidias cards. If you see all the benchmarks, ATi gets less of a hit in 4x AA compared to nvidia. In fact in some cases, you get same hit with 6x on ATi as with 4x on nvidia... they're just balancing it out.

Re:CrossFire

[DreadCthulhu]

Trademarks only generally only valid for one sort of product, and exist to prevent consumer confusion between the makers of similar products. If two companies/people make different products, that are not likely to be confused. they can have the same name for their trademarks - for example, Apple Records and Apple Computers. But if you tried to start a computer company called "Appletastic Computers" Apple Computer could sue you and probably win. Or for a real life example, think of the Lindows case, and how that could get confused the MS Windows OS.

Re:What about the price?

[rpozz]

Given that a single Radeon X850 XT as used in the article retails at around $450, I'd say so. $900 would go quite a long way for the rest of the computer.

Re:3Dmark

[softends]

Both sides are notorious for cheating, but 3DMark05 benchmark is generally a good indicator of gaming performance.

Re:The R520 might make this comparison meaningless

[Thomas DM]

Yes, but it may still take two or more months before the R520 will be available.

And I guess that NVIDIA will start shipping a new faster G70 chip by the time that ATI will launch its R520.

Re:3Dmark

[Guy LeDouche]

Why was this modded funny? It is completely true. 3DMark scores have almost no bearing on real-world game performance.

Do my eyes deceive me?

[Travoltus]

It looks like those video cards overlap not just one, but TWO empty expansion slots that I could use for other cards!

http://img.hexus.net/v2/features/dfi_crossfire_com putex/images/crossfire_big.jpg

This is why I have avoided upgrading to these new generation of cards... I have the lowly 6600 now and that's going to be it, perhaps. I don't like onboard sound (I prefer my Audigy 2, especially for Linux), thank God for the on board USB, FireWire and NIC though; I have a video capture card and a SCSI card for legacy stuff, and there'd be no room for these two cards in any PCI-E system I'd upgrade to... they all come with fewer slots now.

Re:The important thing to remember is that...

[william_w_bush]

not true, nvidia's solution has them creating profiles for popular games for them to function, though i believe you can sli awareness to a game to increase it's support.

my current release has at least a hundred games, and there aren't that many popular games that need this kind of graphics firepower out there.

ATI is great with DRI drivers.

[NRAdude]

The openGL drivers in the Direct Rendering Infrastructure for ATI hardware is quite mature for R250 (Radeon 8500, 9000, 9100) graphics accelerators. Of'course, the driver development was by Tungsten Graphics (makers of PDAs) for a huge graphics rendering system used by The Weather Channel. The drivers are GPL, and they are the best support next to Matrox graphics accelerators. If you want a stable graphics solution, then that is a better choice. If you want all the unnecessary framerate beyond 30 in Doom3, then that is what bleeding-edge hardware is built to accomplish with closed-source drivers. I only try to support all hardware companies that opensource their technical specifications, drivers, protocols, hardware, and intellectual property. XGI is beginning to opensource its information to be a better contender in this arena I described, and their hardware is affordable. There is more than just ATI and nVidia though. My next hardware may be from XGI, and they build closed-source DRI drivers (IIRC).

Re:But will it still be ATI crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

It never ceases to amaze me that nvidia driver bugs get forgotten or ignored so quickly. I still remember a couple years back having to disable the nview extensions on a GF4 - it would hard freeze this Win98 system when enabled with the then-latest drivers. Reinstalled winders? Same thing again. I remember the bugs and problems that showed up with this or that Detonator release back when. Yet all I ever hear from anyone is "I use nvidia, and nobody has ever had a driver problem with them EVAR!" but the second someone posts about a problem and there's an ATI card anywhere near the system, everyone's all "OMG TEH ATI BUGS!"

I've got a 9800 right now in this box (the other one's running a GF4 - MOSTLY bugfree, but rarely used intensively) and apart from a linux UT2004 performance bug (i.e. skipping) on very large maps that was resolved some time ago, the only bug I had was on this latest driver. I saw "New in this release: Added support for 2.6.11 kernel". I decided to try the new 2.6.11 kernel. I set it all up, booted icewm, checked UT2004 and was happy to see some framerate improvements for the third straight release, and after about 30 minutes of testing this-and-that I logged out. Upon logging in to my full Gnome desktop, one of the funky gkrellm extensions I like to run began to load, and this combined with 2.6.11 and the 8.14.13 drivers caused X to freeze. OH NOES! So I switched back to the 2.6.10 kernel, and have had no problems since. I figure, hey, the 2.6.11 support was newly added, and there's a small corner-case bug with it, it will be ironed out later. At no point did I feel compelled to rush off to some usenet group, forum, or /. story to post about how ATI is the devil, their drivers are "useless," how I'm never buying another ATI card again, or any other King of Pain crap. I dealt with it, same as with the nvidia bugs that have hit me.

I'm sure someone will pop up with their ATI horror story now. Feel free to insert wailing and gnashing of teeth if it makes you feel better.