John Reynolds
Member
One thing I'm surprised about is the willingness of people to discuss X-fire bugs within the context of the [H ] article knowing full well they didn't use the first set of drivers that officially supported the configuration.
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HardOCP Crossfire review up
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Personally, I stopped thinking about this "hard":roll: article the second I noted they were running old drivers.
The thing that surprises me is how artfully Rollo tries to shift the argument and call people defenders of ATI to get out of being pinned as an AEG marketing tool, which he very obviously is. I don't think it's right that Rollo is allowed to post here. I hate this viral marketing stuff and feel it pollutes our messageboards.
That's my 2 cents.
Perhaps you could point us at some reviews that use the later drivers?
While the drivers "that officially recognize Crossfire may address some of these issues, I've only seen reviews using the 5.12s.
I'd say it's pretty convenient for you to say "the new drivers will take care of this stuff" in the absence of link to reputable reviews using the new drivers and owning the hardware yourself?
Keysplayr
Elite Member
Are there any xfire reviews out there where the reviewers actually run tests to your satisfaction? I doubt it. Because when you find a review that does actually use the drivers you want them to, you'll complain about the platform they used, or the shoddy mobo. Whatever else there is to complain about. Hey, maybe you will be right, or maybe not.
But if you know of a review that uses the drivers you want, feel free to share it as it would be interesting if the fixes ATI says would be in the latest drivers are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing.
The Driver Heaven review uses the latest drivers , and I was actually impressed by it. (something I thought I'd NEVER say after the "burn the 6800U" stunt and the reviews where their benches had wildly different scores than anyone else)
Anyway, for what it's worth, DH shows 5.13 performance here
John Reynolds
Member
Guys, reading is fundamental. Let me quote myself.
The key to that sentence is the quickness of people to jump on bugs within the context of older drivers being used. I said nothing about whether or not the 5.13s would magically fix every bug or issue currently exhibited by X-fire configurations. Some may be fixed, others not.
Either way, that's not what I wrote so please try not to project your own biases onto my posts. Yes, I know it's shockingly biased on my part to suggest maybe withholding final judgement on a configuration until it's tested by drivers that officially support it. Incredibly biased of me, actually. :Q
The key to that sentence is the quickness of people to jump on bugs within the context of older drivers being used. I said nothing about whether or not the 5.13s would magically fix every bug or issue currently exhibited by X-fire configurations. Some may be fixed, others not.
Either way, that's not what I wrote so please try not to project your own biases onto my posts. Yes, I know it's shockingly biased on my part to suggest maybe withholding final judgement on a configuration until it's tested by drivers that officially support it. Incredibly biased of me, actually. :Q
Wreckage
Banned
Buggy Quad SLI??? The Dell system is the first official release of a Quad SLI setup how and where is it buggy. SLI works just fine for the people who have it and use it. Like I said it only has as many bugs as any single card.
Just about every NVIDIA card sold in the last 2 years supports SLI. They have sold millions of SLI motherboards and now the largest PC seller on the planet sells SLI systems along with dozens of other pc makers. Will it be "mainstream" to you when it comes in a box of cereal and your dad can install it for you?
Noisy and hot is more a description of crossfire. If you want the best gaming solution it's SLI, so by "everyone" I was referring to people who want the best, clearly that's not you and so you can be the exception to the rule.
John Reynolds
Member
Again, I'm not "blaming" anyone, merely suggesting that with complex configurations such as dual PEG systems there's bound to be issues that need ironed out and perhaps it's a prudent course of action to withhold final judgement. Would Rollo start a thread basing his final opinion on, say, a review of the 7800 GTX by a site like Driver Heaven? Hardly, so why the shock when I criticize obvious bad standards used by a site with a clearly and ongoing history of being pretty aggressive to lambast ATI parts and launches? Does this somehow make me biased for ATI or against NVIDIA?
Like I said previously, I'm not a big fan of sinking so much money into a single generation of graphics boards if I were to spend my own $$ doing so. Yet feel free to google away and try to find me criticizing SLI when it was first launched, or at any subsequent point, other than saying I'm not enticed by it, and had a few issues. You won't. Why? Because I'm consistent in my criticisms and when I give and when I withhold those criticisms. And that's all I'm saying here.
And since you asked <g>, yes, I do think ATI got dragged into offering a dual PEG solution to compete against SLI, and that they were surprised at the market uptake for such a solution. Kudos fully belong to NVIDIA for evangelizing this for those who're interested in it as an upgrade path for their systems.
This is not an ATI issue as much as you might wish it to be. This is a "hard" issue.
He also said the review was done before Dec 21st so why did they wait so long to publish the review and make no mention of the special drivers? Nor any mention of why the current drivers were not used? This stuff should be in the review, not their forums. It was a sloppy and late review.
Hopefully for xfire users (if there are any) the system improves drastically with next few set of drivers as was the case with the R520.
This makes no sense in the Hard review:
F.E.A.R.
For single card operation, the advantage definitely leaned toward the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB video card. We were able to run F.E.A.R. at a higher AA setting than the Radeon X1800 XT, which resulted in better image quality throughout the game. Being able to run with some form of Transparency Anti-aliasing helps improve image quality in this game.
Weird that other reviews show the x1800xt out performing the 7800GTX 512 with AA and AF turned up at high res.
This makes no sense in the Hard review:
F.E.A.R.
For single card operation, the advantage definitely leaned toward the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB video card. We were able to run F.E.A.R. at a higher AA setting than the Radeon X1800 XT, which resulted in better image quality throughout the game. Being able to run with some form of Transparency Anti-aliasing helps improve image quality in this game.
Weird that other reviews show the x1800xt out performing the 7800GTX 512 with AA and AF turned up at high res.
Well as they have said before, they don't benchmark but they play the games. So they pretty much subject each card to different conditions which make their results inaccurate and inconsistant. How can you verify their findings? You can't.
Who knows, maybe they left the 512GTX staring at a wall for 5 minutes and generating high FPS's...
IMO those "reviews" are horrible. The card benches aren't consistent between runs and they aren't benched at the same settings, one of the (many) reasons I stopped reading that site.
The fear stress test is quite good since it actually has fire fights, explosions and all other features found when playing the game. Most importantly, it's consistant. I could see someone not using the CS:S stress since it's missing models, but I don't see a reason to not use the FEAR one.
Another major issue with the Hard review.
Why not test HDR+AA on Serious Sam2. It's not Ati's fault that nvidia does not have this feature set. You could simply put another graph up that shows "playable" settings with HDR+AA on x1800 xfire. I'd think someone looking to spend this money on a dual gpu solution would like to know about the performance on such an important IQ feature.
Even more importantly. Add the 7800GTX 256 Sli since that is much more accessible and common than 7800GTX 512 in Sli. The more I examine their review, the worse it gets.
Why not test HDR+AA on Serious Sam2. It's not Ati's fault that nvidia does not have this feature set. You could simply put another graph up that shows "playable" settings with HDR+AA on x1800 xfire. I'd think someone looking to spend this money on a dual gpu solution would like to know about the performance on such an important IQ feature.
Even more importantly. Add the 7800GTX 256 Sli since that is much more accessible and common than 7800GTX 512 in Sli. The more I examine their review, the worse it gets.
apoppin
Lifer
Catalyst 5.13 WHQL @ DriverHeaven
nitpick that 😛
edit . . . i see you also found it 😛
looking pretty good
😀
i guess it was just "driver issues"
:Q
not bad for a :
i guess you need the beer now
:beer:
Hopefully. DH is not the site known for impartiality, they did burn a 6800U as a publicity stunt to show their hate of nVidia last year.
However, the benchmarks look close enough to be legit, they didn't fail to point out XTs are a lot noisier, so perhaps they have changed their ways.
To me, the main downside of Crossfire (as noise doesn't bother me much) is the default tiling mode and the lack of flexibility.
Tiling just stinks, I'm guessing they used it for the D3d because they found it was the most compatible and knew they wouldn't have many profiles done at first.
Could be in the future as the product matures they will give the user the choice, like SLI. Time will tell.
It's better than nothing, but offers the least benefit of all Crossfire methods by far. Having that as your default method on D3d games (most games) without option to switch it seems counterproductive to me.
I talked to a guy on the nVidia driver team who said they didn't even bother with tiling after checking into it because they didn't feel it offered enough performance.
Sorry I have no link, if you look around at reviews though you'll see the general consensus that tiling is not as desirable as it offers no increase in geometry processing power like AFR does. (duplicatrion of geometry processing )
It's not that it doesn't offer benefit, my problem with it is that it offers much less benefit and you can't change it on games where there is no profile in Catalyst.
With SLI, you can pick two different AFR methods to try if there is no profile, and then try SFR if those don't work well.
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