HardOCP Crossfire review up

[nRollo]

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTMwLDEy

When CrossFire works well, it does provide a large increase in performance as we have seen. However, there are bugs that still plague CrossFire. There is the problem we experienced with Quake 4 regarding the refresh rate, and there were some games where we could actually see the game flicker slightly.

As I predicted, Crossfire has it's issues still.

It took us several attempts of uninstalling and reinstalling the driver along with installing and uninstalling the cards in different orders to get CrossFire enabled. Finally, after about 30 minutes of trying to get it to work, we finally managed to get CrossFire enabled.

When we set ?Ultra Quality? mode on the Radeon X1800 XT with the latest Catalyst 5.12 drivers, the game would suddenly crash to the desktop when loading levels, including the very first level airdefense1. This means that we cannot play Quake 4 in ?Ultra Quality? mode on the Radeon X1800 XT in single or CrossFire mode.

We set the refresh back down to an ugly 60Hz at 1600x1200 and then found Quake 4 to work normally in CrossFire mode. Therefore, it seems there is a bug with CrossFire enabled where you cannot force a higher refresh than 60Hz in Quake 4.

Unfortunately, there is no Transparency MultiSampling setting with the X1800 XT.

FEAR page

It is when we go to dual cards that there are some notable differences in image quality and performance. Even with dual video cards, we could not enable Adaptive AA at 1600x1200 on the X1800 XT CrossFire platform. We witnessed a very large performance hit even with CrossFire enabled that made the game simply unplayable.

Serious Sam2 page

When we put the X1800 XT Master Card in and enabled CrossFire, we experienced some strange results. We say weird because performance was actually slower than the single card, but yet we found we were able to enable High Quality AF and did not get the ?lag? like we did with the single card.

NFS page


What a MESS.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Amazing... im just more amazd with the 7800GTX 512mb performance. IT used TR SSAA in almost ALL benchmarks. (Well its to be expected from a steroided GTX)

What i also noticed was the lack of AAA from ATi (On a single XT card). The review seemed to note that Adaptive AA was just too big of a hit. (Or maybe the lack of an AA mode similiar to TR MSAA)

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Amazing... im just more amazd with the 7800GTX 512mb performance. IT used TR SSAA in almost ALL benchmarks. (Well its to be expected from a steroided GTX)

What i also noticed was the lack of AAA from ATi (On a single XT card). The review seemed to note that Adaptive AA was just too big of a hit. (Or maybe the lack of an AA mode similiar to TR MSAA)

Agreed. ATI would have fared better if they had MSAA.

The only qulam I have with that review is they should have had comparably priced 256MB 7800GTXs in there as well.

We pretty much knew the 512 GTXs would win, but they are hard to find at this point and cost more.

I would have liked to see where the 490/1300 GTXs (like XFX and EVGA KO) fall in the hierarchy. They would likely be a little lower, but then at least buyers could evaluate which mattered more to them: waiting for ATI to iron out bugs, or go with a rock solid widely available choice that offers a little less performance.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Can anyone explain the difference in ATi's AA and NVs AA?

NV seems to use MSAA or SSAA. How about ATi?

 

[KeepItRed]

I don't blame Crossfire. Clearly HardOCP has test bed problems. I've never seen anyone use 4x Corsair. Just look at other benchmarks:

Crossfire vs SLI F.E.A.R
Call Of Duty 2

Not to mention these games render in OpenGL.

Half Life 2

 

[CKXP]

at Guru3d.com, the 1800xt crossfire got mixed results Link
the negative:
"So folks .. there you have it. I tried to give you a broad overview of the product that is Crossfire. Let's start with my dislikes. Yeah, we ran into some issues alright. We had several games not performing where they should be (Riddick) and a couple of them (Quake 4, AM3 and Fear) even crashing on a regular basis. That's not exactly what I had in mind for a 3000 USD gaming rig. The bigger part of these issues likely need to be found in the drivers though and, well, ATI has been working hard on drivers the past year or two so I'm confident that with time these bugs will be ruled out. From the other side, it might as well be very isolated to our test system. It might well have been a mainboard issue but I'm really not certain. It does not change the fact that we had some instability though and we always tell it like it is to you guys."

"Heat then. If you loop a hefty timedemo for a couple of hours I guarantee you that your room will warm up. My biggest worry for the Crossfire X1800 is that they have to pull there "cold air" from the inside of the PC. So you need to make very sure that your PC is extremely well ventilated as when the cards are peaking at 80 Degrees C temperatures on the graphics core, and remember .. it's two of them. The last unsettling aspect was noise .. at boot up it's really bizarre and brought back GeForce 5800 Ultra memories. Things will definitely be more quiet once windows has finished booting as the RPM of the fans will go to a silent level. Yet during gameplay occasionally you will hear the noise levels coming from the two fans really loudly."

the good:
"I think the thing runs on kerosene as gaming performance is of course breathtaking and the image quality fantastic. You need to spend a lot of money for a setup like we tested today though. The cards alone are about 1200 USD. It does offer friggin fast performance for the high-end gamers. The platform as tested today shows really good potential and although this review is not about the mainboard, I really was impressed with the RD480 based motherboard as it is really fast.

The X1800 XT Crossfire is a raw pair of gaming performance, really. It's a fleshy, meaty solution and offers impressive performance."

"Let's see .. other stuff I liked. Definitely worthy of mentioning is the ability to hook up four monitors and they can take high-resolutions for sure (crossfire cable need to be removed though). I personally work with two 24" LCDs at 1920x1200 and did not have even the slightest issue at all. Really fun stuff. Think about other functionality also, the media playback/encoding/decoding functions. HDTV, media center, Dual-link DVI, HD gaming, offloading the CPU for playback, H.264 or whatever decoding process you need... this product is capable of it and with the new Catalyst 5.13 drivers it sure is looking good. The new AVIVO implementation seems to be very promising and the Catalyst driver team is working hard on some very exciting stuff for it's enthusiast consumers."

nothing is perfect, and in time it will mature as SLI did.

 

[Cookie Monster]

But come on, thats driverheaven. They havent used 512 GTX though. But according to them, the GTX 256 SLi seems equal with XT crossfire.

 

[KeepItRed]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
But come on, thats driverheaven. They havent used 512 GTX though. But according to them, the GTX 256 SLi seems equal with XT crossfire.

Originally posted by: Driverheaven
Crossfire/X1800XT single/ 7800GTX:
AMD Athlon64 FX55 CPU
2x512mb DDR 3200 (2-2-2-5)
Samsung 80Gb 7200rpm 8mb Cache Sata Drive
Sony DWD22a DVDRW drive
Enermax 535w PSU
ATI Reference Crossfire Motherboard
X1800XT 512mb master and slave cards
X850 XT 256 master and slave cards
Geforce 7800GTX 512mb

7800GT SLI/ 7800 GTX SLI:
AMD Athlon64 FX55 CPU
2x512mb DDR 3200 (2-2-2-5)
Samsung 80Gb 7200rpm 8mb Cache Sata Drive
Sony DWD22a DVDRW drive
Enermax 535w PSU
Asus A8N32-SLI Dlx
2xGeforce 7800 GT 256mb
2xGeforce 7800 GTX 256mb

True, I wonder why they didn't use dual 512MB GTX's . But still, when you look at the performance of the X1800XT Crossfire, they're totally off HardOCP's.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Driverheaven or should i say ATi heaven. Not sure about Hardocp, but i like how they use TR SSAA/AAA etc etc. Plus i like the fact they have the playable settings page.

 

[fierydemise]

Rollo why do you feel it nessisary to selectively quote the article, the conclusion says many positive things about Crossfire none of which appear in your quoting.

The Bottom Line:
The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XT is still playing catch up on the single card front with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512. But since the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is so scarce right now, that point may be moot. We have seen now what an X1800 XT CrossFire platform can do and it does hold its own well against the fastest GPUs that NVIDIA has to offer. It is playing catch up some, but it is catching up. In a few cases, CrossFire is winning.

 

[tuteja1986]

we will see the next round ... anyways hardocp review ain't my fav. i kind of like firingsquad nowdays.

 

[KeepItRed]

Originally posted by: fierydemise
Rollo why do you feel it nessisary to selectively quote the article, the conclusion says many positive things about Crossfire none of which appear in your quoting.

The Bottom Line:
The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XT is still playing catch up on the single card front with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512. But since the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is so scarce right now, that point may be moot. We have seen now what an X1800 XT CrossFire platform can do and it does hold its own well against the fastest GPUs that NVIDIA has to offer. It is playing catch up some, but it is catching up. In a few cases, CrossFire is winning.

Pwned. lol

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
But come on, thats driverheaven. They havent used 512 GTX though. But according to them, the GTX 256 SLi seems equal with XT crossfire.

Dude, just because Driverheaven burns nVidia cards like petulant children and posts benchmarks no one on the web can replicate, doesn't mean they're not a great review site!

 

[fierydemise]

Originally posted by: KeepItRed

Originally posted by: fierydemise
Rollo why do you feel it nessisary to selectively quote the article, the conclusion says many positive things about Crossfire none of which appear in your quoting.

The Bottom Line:
The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XT is still playing catch up on the single card front with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512. But since the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is so scarce right now, that point may be moot. We have seen now what an X1800 XT CrossFire platform can do and it does hold its own well against the fastest GPUs that NVIDIA has to offer. It is playing catch up some, but it is catching up. In a few cases, CrossFire is winning.

Pwned. lol

Don't do that, I was asking a simple question, I don't want to desend into childishness name calling

 

[KeepItRed]

Found a nice F.E.A.R comparisment:

Tech Report

The only thing that boggles me is how can the 7800GTX 256MB in SLI beat the 7800GTX 512MB in SLI?

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: fierydemise
Rollo why do you feel it nessisary to selectively quote the article, the conclusion says many positive things about Crossfire none of which appear in your quoting.

The Bottom Line:
The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XT is still playing catch up on the single card front with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512. But since the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is so scarce right now, that point may be moot. We have seen now what an X1800 XT CrossFire platform can do and it does hold its own well against the fastest GPUs that NVIDIA has to offer. It is playing catch up some, but it is catching up. In a few cases, CrossFire is winning.

The negatives in that review seemed to outweigh the positives Fiery.

After reading that, and the Guru 3D review, I don't consider X1800XT Crossfire a usable solution at this point. People about to spend $1000 on a multi card solution need to know this.

The X1800XT, on the other hand, I think is a GREAT deal for someone looking to spend $500 on a video card.

 

[KeepItRed]

Originally posted by: fierydemise

Originally posted by: KeepItRed

Originally posted by: fierydemise
Rollo why do you feel it nessisary to selectively quote the article, the conclusion says many positive things about Crossfire none of which appear in your quoting.

The Bottom Line:
The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XT is still playing catch up on the single card front with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512. But since the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is so scarce right now, that point may be moot. We have seen now what an X1800 XT CrossFire platform can do and it does hold its own well against the fastest GPUs that NVIDIA has to offer. It is playing catch up some, but it is catching up. In a few cases, CrossFire is winning.

Pwned. lol

Don't do that, I was asking a simple question, I don't want to desend into childishness name calling

How is Pwned name calling?

Here's is definition since you need one: Text

 

[KeepItRed]

Originally posted by: Rollo

Originally posted by: fierydemise
Rollo why do you feel it nessisary to selectively quote the article, the conclusion says many positive things about Crossfire none of which appear in your quoting.

The Bottom Line:
The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XT is still playing catch up on the single card front with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512. But since the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is so scarce right now, that point may be moot. We have seen now what an X1800 XT CrossFire platform can do and it does hold its own well against the fastest GPUs that NVIDIA has to offer. It is playing catch up some, but it is catching up. In a few cases, CrossFire is winning.

The negatives in that review seemed to outweigh the positives Fiery.

After reading that, and the Guru 3D review, I don't consider X1800XT Crossfire a usable solution at this point. People about to spend $1000 on a multi card solution need to know this.

The X1800XT, on the other hand, I think is a GREAT deal for someone looking to spend $500 on a video card.

They did mention "Crossfire is catching up" so hopefully ATI doesn't screw up on the R580 Crossfire boards.

 

[fierydemise]

Originally posted by: Rollo

Originally posted by: fierydemise
Rollo why do you feel it nessisary to selectively quote the article, the conclusion says many positive things about Crossfire none of which appear in your quoting.

The Bottom Line:
The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XT is still playing catch up on the single card front with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512. But since the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is so scarce right now, that point may be moot. We have seen now what an X1800 XT CrossFire platform can do and it does hold its own well against the fastest GPUs that NVIDIA has to offer. It is playing catch up some, but it is catching up. In a few cases, CrossFire is winning.

The negatives in that review seemed to outweigh the positives Fiery.

After reading that, and the Guru 3D review, I don't consider X1800XT Crossfire a usable solution at this point. People about to spend $1000 on a multi card solution need to know this.

The X1800XT, on the other hand, I think is a GREAT deal for someone looking to spend $500 on a video card.

I agree with you, at this point Crossfire is not reliable enough for someone who wants to spend $1000s of dollars on a system, but SLI had similar problems in the beggining, now their mostly ironed out and SLI is a perfectly viable solution for most people. I have no doubt that Crossfire will get better as time goes on just like SLI did.

My question is why don't you let the article speak for itself? The disscussion will be more intelligent if everyone read the article and not just commented on selective quotes IMHO.

 

[fierydemise]

Originally posted by: KeepItRed

Originally posted by: fierydemise

Originally posted by: KeepItRed

Originally posted by: fierydemise
Rollo why do you feel it nessisary to selectively quote the article, the conclusion says many positive things about Crossfire none of which appear in your quoting.

The Bottom Line:
The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XT is still playing catch up on the single card front with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512. But since the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is so scarce right now, that point may be moot. We have seen now what an X1800 XT CrossFire platform can do and it does hold its own well against the fastest GPUs that NVIDIA has to offer. It is playing catch up some, but it is catching up. In a few cases, CrossFire is winning.

Pwned. lol

Don't do that, I was asking a simple question, I don't want to desend into childishness name calling

How is Pwned name calling?

Here's is definition since you need one: Text

I never said Pwned was namecalling, I just said it is leading down the road to namecalling. I was never intending to beat Rollo, I just posed a question.

 

[KeepItRed]

Originally posted by: fierydemise

Originally posted by: KeepItRed

Originally posted by: fierydemise

Originally posted by: KeepItRed

Originally posted by: fierydemise
Rollo why do you feel it nessisary to selectively quote the article, the conclusion says many positive things about Crossfire none of which appear in your quoting.

The Bottom Line:
The bottom line is that the Radeon X1800 XT is still playing catch up on the single card front with a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512. But since the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is so scarce right now, that point may be moot. We have seen now what an X1800 XT CrossFire platform can do and it does hold its own well against the fastest GPUs that NVIDIA has to offer. It is playing catch up some, but it is catching up. In a few cases, CrossFire is winning.

Pwned. lol

Don't do that, I was asking a simple question, I don't want to desend into childishness name calling

How is Pwned name calling?

Here's is definition since you need one: Text

I never said Pwned was namecalling, I just said it is leading down the road to namecalling. I was never intending to beat Rollo, I just posed a question.

It's a joke man, because "Crossfire wins in a few cases" can't be ownage. Lighten up.

 

[fierydemise]

Originally posted by: KeepItRed
It's a joke man, because "Crossfire wins in a few cases" can't be ownage. Lighten up.

Sorry I've just seen so many threads devolve into useless flamefests that I'm sick of it and so maybe I'm a bit over serious.

 

[justly]

This quote was taken from Rollo's post and is suposed to be from an article written the 8th of Jan... does anyone see a problem here?

quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When we set ?Ultra Quality? mode on the Radeon X1800 XT with the latest Catalyst 5.12 drivers, the game would suddenly crash to the desktop when loading levels, including the very first level airdefense1. This means that we cannot play Quake 4 in ?Ultra Quality? mode on the Radeon X1800 XT in single or CrossFire mode.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I thought the 5.13 drivers where out.

I guess I should thank rollo for the quote, now I allready know the quality of the article before I read it (where is my big grain of salt).

 

[Wreckage]

Originally posted by: justly
This quote was taken from Rollo's post and is suposed to be from an article written the 8th of Jan... does anyone see a problem here?

quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When we set ?Ultra Quality? mode on the Radeon X1800 XT with the latest Catalyst 5.12 drivers, the game would suddenly crash to the desktop when loading levels, including the very first level airdefense1. This means that we cannot play Quake 4 in ?Ultra Quality? mode on the Radeon X1800 XT in single or CrossFire mode.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I thought the 5.13 drivers where out.

I guess I should thank rollo for the quote, now I allready know the quality of the article before I read it (where is my big grain of salt).

From what I read in the Hardocp forums, that was the driver ATI sent them to test the cards with.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

give ATI a year to fine tune their SLI implementation the way Nvidia has. SLI caters to such a TINY fraction of the gaming market I don't see why anyone here really cares (besides Rollo). For 99% of us, it's all about the single-card performance.