Top hardware techsters Anandtech have managed to get ahold of some pre-production CrossFire hardware from Gigabyte and have run it through their test suite.
CrossFire, in case you missed it, is ATI's answer to Nvidia's SLI technology. It was announced a couple of months ago, but is yet to ship.
Anandtech found that the drivers were currently a little flakey, as you might expect from pre-release hardware (although, considering it was launched two months ago...) They found that the supertiling mode worked fine, but that anti-aliasing was a bit hit and miss.
In terms of performance, CrossFire with two X850 cards comes out behind 6800 SLI in some titles, like Doom 3, and ahead in others, like Half-Life 2.
Worryingly for ATI, CrossFire is beaten in some tests by a single Nvidia 7800GTX, which will inevitably be cheaper than a new graphics card and new motherboard (required for CrossFire).
Of course, we could point to ATI's lack of Shader Model 3.0 support as an argument for simply buying a single 7800GTX.
When we're actually going to see CrossFire on the shelves, nobody quite knows - it's been delayed quite a while already, and it seems senseless to launch it now with R520 just around the corner (maybe).
Our own preview of CrossFire is here, for reference.
Do you think CrossFire is going to be a waste of time on X850, or is it going to kick SLI's butt? We want to know Your thoughts.
CrossFire, in case you missed it, is ATI's answer to Nvidia's SLI technology. It was announced a couple of months ago, but is yet to ship.
Anandtech found that the drivers were currently a little flakey, as you might expect from pre-release hardware (although, considering it was launched two months ago...) They found that the supertiling mode worked fine, but that anti-aliasing was a bit hit and miss.
In terms of performance, CrossFire with two X850 cards comes out behind 6800 SLI in some titles, like Doom 3, and ahead in others, like Half-Life 2.
Worryingly for ATI, CrossFire is beaten in some tests by a single Nvidia 7800GTX, which will inevitably be cheaper than a new graphics card and new motherboard (required for CrossFire).
Of course, we could point to ATI's lack of Shader Model 3.0 support as an argument for simply buying a single 7800GTX.
When we're actually going to see CrossFire on the shelves, nobody quite knows - it's been delayed quite a while already, and it seems senseless to launch it now with R520 just around the corner (maybe).
Our own preview of CrossFire is here, for reference.
Do you think CrossFire is going to be a waste of time on X850, or is it going to kick SLI's butt? We want to know Your thoughts.
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