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ATI X1800 CrossFire Cards Reviewed
AnInkle writes "ATI finally joins the Christmas party. If money is (virtually) no object and high-end 3D animation is part of your game, you'll want to check out The Tech Report's review of the ATI X1800 CrossFire card before spending your green on the green team. From the review: 'This new CrossFire card also sweeps away some of the limitations of the first-generation CrossFire hardware introduced just a couple of months ago, allowing mega-high-res gaming.' Further, if the latest rumors about the 7800GTX 512MB are true, it would mean that this CrossFire graphics subsystem would arguably stand alone at the top of the graphics benchmarking mountain."
14 pages of clicking through ads... lol
Conclusions
A Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire rig is mighty fast. Also, it's six degrees Fahrenheit outside right now at my place, and I've enjoyed the room-warming benefits of CrossFire and SLI systems throughout the preparation of this review. My mind boggles, though, when I try to consider the value proposition of plunking down $1200 for a pair of graphics cards and roughly $200 more for the motherboard. Could a pair of Radeon X1800 XT cards in CrossFire be a better deal than two GeForce 7800 GTX 512s in SLI?
Yeah, I suppose so, especially with GTX 512 prices currently in low-altitude orbit. I do have my reservations about CrossFire, including the hassle of dealing with external dongles and the iffy I/O performance of CrossFire motherboards that use ATI's SB450 south bridge. Still, CrossFire performance generally scales well enough from one card to two, and I said in my initial CrossFire review that the long-term success of this solution would hinge on the quality of ATI's new GPUs. Turns out that the Radeon X1800 XT is a very desirable graphics card that matches the GeForce 7800 GTX feature for feature and adds a few new wrinkles of its own, including finer threading granularity for Shader Model 3.0 and the ability to do antialiasing with high-dynamic-range rendering. The Radeon X1800 XT trails the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 in overall performance, but Radeon X1800 CrossFire may hit the streets at prices as much as $150 lower per card than the 7800 GTX 512. (Radeon X1800 XTs are already widely available at $599 or less.) In the rarefied air of big-money graphics subsystems, that potential $300 price difference--if indeed it develops--could make a Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire system a, uh, er, uhm, solid value.
Yeah, I said it.
It's bitchin' fast, at any rate.
Don't go buying a Radeon X1800 XL card, however, expecting to add a Radeon X1800 CrossFire card later if you care at all about value. Dropping a $599 CrossFire card into your system and lopping off half of its RAM and much of its performance potential isn't the brightest of moves. That solution sacrificies too much, in my view. You can get a dual-graphics solution involving a Radeon X1800 XL, but it's far from optimal. Perhaps in the future, if prices drop dramatically on the Radeon X1800 CrossFire Edition cards, teaming one up with an XL could make some sense. That seems like a shaky prospect to me, though.
The GTX 256's perform at or near the X1800XT's (looking at the linked benchmarks). These cards will cost you at least $400 less for a pair, use a single slot design, run cooler and quieter.
**(And yes they now support Linux in SLI).
http://www.kubuntu.org/
My friend that works at ATI was able to view this card in action at the labs and the demos were amazing but he told me ATI continues to lack in the driver department. He informed me that there is about 1 floor working on drivers which is about 60 people and they have not been up to par with the hardware that they seem to be producing. Hes gotten his hands on a couple of their video cards for testing and many of them have crashed his computer forcing him to format/reinstall his operating system. IMHO, I think that ATI should really look into improving their driver support.
GL HF!
It is hard to get excited about bleeding edge graphics cards, because ATI and NVidia refuse to publish their register sets so people can write good free Linux drivers. I have programmed ARM, Blackfin, and PIC processors. In all cases the registers are exhaustively documented and there are thriving communities of experts trying to get the most out of them. Your $600 video card's drivers were probably developed by a team of 4. Is the code any good? You will never know. Thanks for nothing ATI and NVidia.
an ill wind that blows no good