ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation

Name: ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation - Page 11
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, December 20, 2005, 08:00 AM EDT

We didn't perform a comprehensive test routine to assess the performance of all of ATI's CrossFire Super-AA modes, but we did run a couple of tests to get a general idea as to how the various modes perform. ATI claimed the new compositing engine on the X1800 XT Master Card offers higher-performance than the engine used on the X850 XT though, so we wanted to see this for ourselves.

CrossFire AA Performance: Half Life 2 & FarCry

Upping the Number of Samples

As you can see, ATI's claims of a faster compositing engine appear to be true. As expected, performance is much lower than standard AA when using CrossFire, because each card is rendering the same frame as opposed to alternating frames, but performance remained quite good in both games we tested. With either Half-Life 2 or FarCry running at 1280x1024 with all in-game graphical option set to their respective maximums, and with 16x anisotropic filtering enabled, the X1800 XT CrossFire system was able to maintain very playable framerates.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, Fire, CrossFire, SSF, Evaluation, x1, OS, ATI Radeon, OSS, XT, Lua, 180

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com