CrossFire Xpress 1600 Motherboards: DFI, Asus, ECS

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 04, 2006, 01:30 AM EDT

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CrossFire Performance: FarCry & Splinter Cell

For out next batch of in-game testing, we installed a pair of Radeon X1900 XT cards into the CrossFire Xpress 1600 systems, enabled CrossFire, and ran some high-resolution benchmarks with a few popular games -- FarCry and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

Performance Comparisons with FarCry v1.33

Details: http://www.farcry.ubi.com/

FarCry

If you've been on top of the gaming scene for some time, you probably know that FarCry was one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC last year. Courtesy of its proprietary engine, dubbed "CryEngine" by its developers, FarCry's game-play is enhanced by Polybump mapping, advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, dynamic lighting, motion-captured animation, and surround sound. Before titles such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 hit the scene, FarCry gave us a taste of what was to come in next-generation 3D gaming on the PC. We benchmarked the systems in this article with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint at a resolution of 1600x1200 with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

All three of the boards produced similar framerates, and scaled appropriately in our custom FarCry benchmark. The DFI RDX200 CF-DR technically came out on top with the highest single-GPU and CrossFire framerates, but only 1 to 3 frames per second separated the systems depending on the particular test configuration.

Performance Comparisons with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05

Details: http://www.splintercell3.com/us/

SC: Chaos Theory

Based on a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine, enhanced with a slew of DX9 shaders, lighting and mapping effects, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is gorgeous with its very immersive, albeit dark, environment. The game engine has a shader model 3.0 code path that allows the GeForce 6 & 7 Series of cards, and the X1000 family of cards, to really shine. For these tests we enabled the SM 3.0 path on all of the cards we tested. However, High Dynamic Range rendering was disabled so that we could test the game with anti-aliasing enabled (a future patch should enable AA with HDR on the X1K family). We benchmarked the game at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

The Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory benchmark scaled significantly going form one GPU to two. There were no significant performance differences between the three CrossFire Xpress 1600 boards we tested, however. Less than one frame per second separated each of the CrossFire Xpress 1600 motherboards in both of the test configurations.