ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation

Name: ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation - Page 8
Brand: ATI

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

Performance Comparisons with Doom 3

Details: http://www.doom3.com/

Doom 3

id Software's games have long been pushing the limits of 3D graphics. Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 were all instrumental in the success of 3D accelerators on the PC. Now, many years later, with virtually every new desktop computer shipping with some sort of 3D accelerator, id is at it again with the visually stunning Doom 3. Like most of id's previous titles, Doom 3 is an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows. We ran this batch of Doom 3 single player benchmarks using a custom demo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 without anti-aliasing enabled and then again with 4X AA and 8X aniso enabled simultaneously.

Although ATI's recent driver updates have improved OpenGL performance dramatically, their cards still fall prey to NVIDIA in our custom Doom 3 benchmark. Both GeForce 7800 GTX SLI configurations, whether equipped with 256MB or faster clocked 512MB cards, handily outpaced both CrossFire rigs by significant margins. If we focus on performance when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were enabled, the GeForce 7800 SLI systems outperformed either CrossFire configuration by margins ranging from about 20 FPS all the way up to about 50 FPS. Without any additional pixel processing, these margins are even bigger. So, while the 90+ FPS the pair of Radeon X1800 XTs running in CrossFire mode is nothing to sneeze at, it's just not enough to challenge NVIDIA's best within the Doom 3 environment.

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