Crossfire Reviews

[rbV5]

Saw them linked at Rage3D, looks like Ratchet was right about the resolution limitation. Its unfortunate since my CRT supports higher resolutions and refresh rates, its just not going to be a solution for me. Feel free to link any Crossfire Motherboards or Crossfire Master Cards you come across.Link
(Summarized)

Anandtech

ATI?s Crossfire: Best Overclocker on the Market?

The ATI Crossfire AMD reached a new record with our standard 4000+ Clawhammer. The highest previous overclock at stock multiplier was 240, but the ATI chipset went on to a stable 245. This would be quite an accomplishment for any board, but it is remarkable for a Reference board. The 315 Maximum bus frequency is also a great performance, second only to the DFI nForce4, which reached 318. We suspect that more time and tweaking may even have allowed us to break this record.

ATI clearly set out to build an enthusiast board that manufacturers could copy down to the smallest detail. Our advice to most manufacturers would be to copy the Reference Design. Unless you are certain that you can extract even more performance from this chipset, it is best to copy this top-performing Reference board.

Anandtech

Final Words
The final verdict on CrossFire is very mixed. It is clear from our Game tests that SLI has a worth competitor with parts in its price range at 1600x1200@60Hz and below. But we have a hard time buying the idea that many gamers are going to shell out the money necessary for CrossFire with that kind of limitation. With cards like the 7800 GTX out there, and more very interesting hardware from ATI coming soon, we are very inclined to recommend a single card upgrade. Especially to users who have 1280x1024 LCD panels or want larger than 1600x1200 resolutions from their graphics card.

Fortunately, ATI has stated that near term future products will utilize dual-link TMDS receivers and allow users to run monitors like the 30" Apple Cinema display under CrossFire. While the TMDS communication is a very interesting solution to the multi GPU problem, limiting resolution based on available bandwidth just doesn't make sense to us. Scaling at the high end doesn't matter as much as compatibility. But as long as bandwidth does limit output resolution, we are very happy to see ATI move to dual-link TMDS communication for their future parts...........
.

Firing Squad

...That?s right, the rumors you?ve been hearing about CrossFire being limited to 1600x1200 max resolution at a headache-inducing 60Hz are unfortunately true. How ATI?s engineers could have overlooked this limitation when developing CrossFire ? a product which doesn?t really shine until you crank up the screen resolutions ? is pretty baffling. To add insult to injury, we couldn?t get DOOM 3?s timedemo mode to work properly with CrossFire.....

The Tech Report

....Other CrossFire shortcomings will likely be addressed with the release of new ATI graphics hardware, including the resolution/refresh rate ceiling of 1600x1200 at 60Hz. However, some CrossFire idiosyncracies probably won't be going away any time soon, including the need for a separate CrossFire Edition master card, those pesky external cables, and the relatively pokey PCI and USB performance of the Radeon Xpress 200 south bridge....

Driverheaven

....Overall this initial implementation of the CrossFire technology is a success; it sets a solid foundation from which ATI can build in upcoming generations. At this time though it is no match for a 7800 SLI system in terms of outright performance and feature set (SM3) and because of this it?s hard to recommend when weighed again Nvidia's SLI. If nothing else CrossFire has made us more impatient to see what R5xx brings to the market and just how much it will benefit from this technology....

Beyond3D

....In this current configuration Crossfire does have a few hurdles associated with it. The resolution issue is likely to be a sticking point for many CRT users, especially those that have displays capable of greater than 1600x1200, however single link panel users are not going to notice any differences - given the fact that, curtsey of Avivo, ATI's next generation graphics boards all integrate dual link DVI capabilities, this gives ATI a good reason to support dual link a receiver and transmitter on the composite engine should their next generation of Crossfire use a similar Master/Slave concept, hence we suspect that this limitation may be removed for the R520 Crossfire. We also experienced a few setup issues when initially putting the system together and whether or not these were isolated events, hopefully they will keep clamping down on such things over time.....

bit-tech

....The CrossFire technology
On a technical level, the theory behind CrossFire is great. When Super-tiling works, it is something that NVIDIA can't match, both in terms of performance and ease of use. It's just unfortunate that, right now, driver issues appear to be preventing it from working in every situation we'd expect it to. CrossFire AA is great for image quality, although NVIDIA's SLI AA is pretty similar. The fact you can use an existing ATI card is sort of cool, although we've already reached the conclusion that going down that route is probably wasting money.....

[HardOCP

The Bottom Line:

The bottom line is this: you do get a performance increase with two Radeon X850 XTs over a single Radeon X850 XT. The CrossFire platform can give you faster performance in games than your single ATI video card.

However, this faster performance is not cheap. You have to have a Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition motherboard chipset and you have to purchase a Radeon X800 or X850 XT CrossFire master card. Add to all of this a single Radeon X850 XT, or other card, if you don?t have one already. This is not an in-expensive venture, just like NVIDIA's SLI.

Alternatively, you can purchase just one single GeForce 7800 GTX, which is CHEAPER than the CrossFire needs mentioned above and it runs on all current PCI-Express motherboards. In our performance testing, the single GeForce 7800 GTX was able to match or beat the CrossFire platform in performance and image quality. The 7800 GTX also defeats the CrossFire platform in features for future game titles....

PC Perspective

....As you see now, ATI clearly is putting the X850 XT against the 6800 Ultra and is leaving the 7800 cards for the upcoming R520 to compete with. If ATI can keep the prices on these cards at or below this level, then they might have a chance of selling a few of them. But, considering that the NVIDIA 7800 GT card is selling for just over $350 today, users starting from scratch will definitely be looking elsewhere.....

ExtremeTech

Is CrossFire a Winner?
Our relatively short time with ATI's CrossFire solution holds out a lot of promise. CrossFire definitely does what it's advertised to do. On the whole, our tests showed that the benefit of dual ATI graphics cards is slightly better than the benefit of dual Nvidia cards. CrossFire's ability to use two slightly mismatched cards is another nice benefit, and we like the idea of enabling CrossFire with just a BIOS option.

But ATI's new dual-graphics technology is not without drawbacks. The DVI dongle seems a bit clunky compared with a nice little internal card-link like the one used for SLI, and the need to buy a special "CrossFire Edition" card instead of just any additional matched graphics card is kind of a bummer. People looking to pick up a second-hand card on eBay to boost their graphics performance probably won't find a CrossFire Edition card nearly as easily as a matched Nvidia card. ATI used to have an advantage in that you could mix boards from different vendors, but Nvidia has recently revealed that this feature is about to be included in its next major driver revision. The most disturbing drawback is the way resolution and refresh rate are currently limited to the output capabilities of a single-link DVI TMDS.....

HotHardware

...Performance Summary: ATI's Radeon X850 XT CrossFire implementation compares very favorably to NVIDIA's previous generation of GeForce 6 cards. Throughout our batter of benchmarks, the Radeon X850 XT CrossFire configuration was able to outperform a pair of GeForce 6800 Ultras in most Direct3D tests, but in the OpenGL tests using Doom 3 and Riddick, the 6800 Ultras took the lead. NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX cards were untouchable in most tests, however. Perhaps a pair of ATI's next-gen cards will be able to compete more closely with a GeForce 7800 GTX SLI rig? Time will tell....

t-break

....In our opinion, the only reason ATI is releasing CrossFire on the x800/850 series is to show that they do have the technology ready. We're sure that we'll see it implemented on their newer GPUs in a more timely manner.

Tom's Hardware

Conclusion

It is clear that like SLI, CrossFire provides a solid foundation for dual graphics gaming. The software support with Catalyst is refreshing in that everything works without having to reset the entire system. The other major advantage of CrossFire is that you can use non-identical cards to achieve higher performance than is possible with one card. From our early observations, the ATI solution also has the better image quality, but we would like to do some more detailed testing on that.....

 

[rise]

oi

 

[biostud]

no fanboiyism here, but who the fvck are going to buy two videocards with a 1600x1200@60Hz limitation??????

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: biostud
no fanboiyism here, but who the fvck are going to buy two videocards with a 1600x1200@60Hz limitation??????

Looks like I'll be looking forward to a new revision if Crossfire is in my plans at all.

 

[DRavisher]

Looks to me like nvidias slides was pure truth then, eh? A very rare thing in deed.

 

[Banzai042]

Wow, ATI seems to have really dropped the ball here. At this point the only bright point for ATI is that crossfire will be out when the R520 comes out. The release of crossfire for the last gen of cards right before the release of a new gen seems like a token "hey look, we can do it too" more than anything else to me. Espescially since it looks to me like the crossfire x850s don't seem to come anywhere close to beating a single 7800gtx on a regular basis.

 

[eastvillager]

They really dropped the ball there. I just don't see any point in SLI/Crossfire unless you're going beyond 1600x1200. Only only went SLI because the native res of my lcd is 1920x1200.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: biostud
no fanboiyism here, but who the fvck are going to buy two videocards with a 1600x1200@60Hz limitation??????

@60Hz.... If we are talking LCD on DVI, who cares? I have not seen a LCD that displays scan lines at 60Hz yet. Has anyone else? (notes though that all the testing we did was with video and not high frame rate games) Could this be an artificial limitation like it not doing PS4?

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: gsellis

Originally posted by: biostud
no fanboiyism here, but who the fvck are going to buy two videocards with a 1600x1200@60Hz limitation??????

@60Hz.... If we are talking LCD on DVI, who cares? I have not seen a LCD that displays scan lines at 60Hz yet. Has anyone else? (notes though that all the testing we did was with video and not high frame rate games) Could this be an artificial limitation like it not doing PS4?

True, If you have a 1600x1200 native resolution on your LCD panel, its the same with SLI or Crossfire, so no biggie if thats "your" limitation. There is no denying that there are limitations if you were to want to game above that resolution and refresh, so its not going to be an option for those users.

 

[biostud]

Originally posted by: gsellis

Originally posted by: biostud
no fanboiyism here, but who the fvck are going to buy two videocards with a 1600x1200@60Hz limitation??????

@60Hz.... If we are talking LCD on DVI, who cares? I have not seen a LCD that displays scan lines at 60Hz yet. Has anyone else? (notes though that all the testing we did was with video and not high frame rate games) Could this be an artificial limitation like it not doing PS4?

Personally I'm running a CRT, and I guess that most of the SLI/Crossfire users are running either highend CRT's or High Res TFT's, making Crossfire an inferior product.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: rbV5
True, If you have a 1600x1200 native resolution on your LCD panel, its the same with SLI or Crossfire, so no biggie if thats "your" limitation. There is no denying that there are limitations if you were to want to game above that resolution and refresh, so its not going to be an option for those users.

Yep. Have not seen a Dell/Apple yet. The only ones we have messed with with any detail were 1080 Iiyama 46" and 720 Iiyama 40" monitors (A HD project that ran out of money). That is not to say that by the end of the year (3 months), the industry won't have a > 1600x1200 LCD that is generally available. The tech is changing fast.

 

[ddogg]

Originally posted by: biostud

Originally posted by: gsellis

Originally posted by: biostud
no fanboiyism here, but who the fvck are going to buy two videocards with a 1600x1200@60Hz limitation??????

@60Hz.... If we are talking LCD on DVI, who cares? I have not seen a LCD that displays scan lines at 60Hz yet. Has anyone else? (notes though that all the testing we did was with video and not high frame rate games) Could this be an artificial limitation like it not doing PS4?

Personally I'm running a CRT, and I guess that most of the SLI/Crossfire users are running either highend CRT's or High Res TFT's, making Crossfire an inferior product.

QFT

 

[dnavarro]

you have got to be kidding me. The Dell 2405FPW is readily available and extremely popular here. And that is 1920x1200. No way I would subject that to crossfire's limitations. And for the CRT users out there...ouch!

 

[Xcobra]

it would be a total waste of money.... :disgust:

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: gsellis

Originally posted by: rbV5
True, If you have a 1600x1200 native resolution on your LCD panel, its the same with SLI or Crossfire, so no biggie if thats "your" limitation. There is no denying that there are limitations if you were to want to game above that resolution and refresh, so its not going to be an option for those users.

Yep. Have not seen a Dell/Apple yet. The only ones we have messed with with any detail were 1080 Iiyama 46" and 720 Iiyama 40" monitors (A HD project that ran out of money). That is not to say that by the end of the year (3 months), the industry won't have a > 1600x1200 LCD that is generally available. The tech is changing fast.

THe "big" problem though is that there are a lot of enthusiast running 21" + CRT monitors and even 1600x1200@60Hz isn't good enough for a 19" CRT. Its disappoing news to anyone with a 19" or larger CRT, or a LCD + 1600x1200. Since I've had my CRT for several years, as most monitors do...chances are pretty fair you are going to want higher supported resolution. That leaves X800 Crossfire out for me, and if the next gen doesn't deal with the current limitation, crossfire doesn't look like its for me.

 

[ddogg]

we'll have to wait and see how R520 performs in Crossfire. hopefully it does better there.

 

[dug777]

Originally posted by: Banzai042
Wow, ATI seems to have really dropped the ball here. At this point the only bright point for ATI is that crossfire will be out when the R520 comes out. The release of crossfire for the last gen of cards right before the release of a new gen seems like a token "hey look, we can do it too" more than anything else to me. Espescially since it looks to me like the crossfire x850s don't seem to come anywhere close to beating a single 7800gtx on a regular basis.

thats my take on it.

Besides when r520 and crossfire for that launches it will be pretty much irrelevant (and you can bet they'll have fixed that res limitation then.

 

[Creig]

It definitely looks like Crossfire will not be a worthwhile consideration for those with X800 series cards. I'd imagine that the R520 will have updated hardware that will eliminate this limitation and allow higher resolutions/refresh rates, but obviously we won't know until it's released/reviewed.

 

[jdogg707]

I guess the Dell 2001FP fans can rejoice, everyone else can just sit back and keep their wallets closed.

 

[ViRGE]

Did any sites take a look at X800 pairups(and not the X850)? One review I read noted that the X800 XF card is an XL, so I'm curious at how constrained that makes pairups with all the X800 cards that have a faster core clock(the Pro, XT, and XT PE).

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: Creig
It definitely looks like Crossfire will not be a worthwhile consideration for those with X800 series cards. I'd imagine that the R520 will have updated hardware that will eliminate this limitation and allow higher resolutions/refresh rates, but obviously we won't know until it's released/reviewed.

This is a sad joke on the gaming community.

I've said before Crossfire borders on being a fraudulent attempt to steal from the public.

To release a product that basically excludes every gamer on the planet except those with <21" LCDs and 17" CRTs would seem shortsighted on ATIs part.

ATI gamers waited a year for this mess?

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: Rollo

Originally posted by: Creig
It definitely looks like Crossfire will not be a worthwhile consideration for those with X800 series cards. I'd imagine that the R520 will have updated hardware that will eliminate this limitation and allow higher resolutions/refresh rates, but obviously we won't know until it's released/reviewed.

This is a sad joke on the gaming community.

I've said before Crossfire borders on being a fraudulent attempt to steal from the public.

To release a product that basically excludes every gamer on the planet except those with <21" LCDs and 17" CRTs would seem shortsighted on ATIs part.

ATI gamers waited a year for this mess?

Borders on fraud? Now that reviewers have had a go with the tech, the user can make a decision based o their needs, it looks like their will be not many with that need with this version of crossfire, hardly fraud however.

 

[nRollo]

rbV5-
How would you like to be a gamer with a CRT who buys this, spends big bucks thinking you're going to get a "high end, enthusiast" solution, and find out you're limited to 12X10?

Have you tried looking at a CRT at 60Hz? It's not a pleasant thing!

My wording is a little strong, but no one on this planet should really buy this. If you look at the Firing Squad benches, the 7800GTX equals it in performance pretty much across the board.

If you need dual card, 6800GT SLI is cheaper and has a better feature set and motherboard.

There's really NO reason anyone would want this.

 

[Keysplayr]

So why is this happening with ATI? Honest question.
Crossfire seems like it's not going to be preferred after all the reviews today.
A 16 pipe insanely clocked (R520 with SM3.0)
Incredibly late to market. (Process limitation?)

Unless anyone can say differently, this has to be the worst year for ATI in their entire history. WHY?

Are they incapable? Under staffed with mediocre engineers? I have no clue.
ATI fans are dissappointed everywhere. In every aspect of ATI. What gives? What is going on?

 

[ArchAngel777]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
So why is this happening with ATI? Honest question.
Crossfire seems like it's not going to be preferred after all the reviews today.
A 16 pipe insanely clocked (R520 with SM3.0)
Incredibly late to market. (Process limitation?)

Unless anyone can say differently, this has to be the worst year for ATI in their entire history. WHY?

Are they incapable? Under staffed with mediocre engineers? I have no clue.
ATI fans are dissappointed everywhere. In every aspect of ATI. What gives? What is going on?

Pretty sure the rage cards were worse for them in that point in history... LOL, I laughed when ATI was out back then. We always made Jokes about them at the store in at the tech counter... Good times...

I am pretty sure the R520 failed due to the 90nm manufacturing process. They made a mistake like nVidia did the 5800 and predicted incorrectly. They will pay dearly for it, though. As far as this Crossfire goes, you would think they would have thought this out more... It appears that Crossfire is going to be a real downer, at first. Much worse than when SLI was first released.