SimHQ.com - Technology Zone - Review: ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire

Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2004 was configured with high settings enabled across its four display panels, with the max texture slider set at full and hardware lights at four. SimHQ's demo is of a short dusk flight over Hong Kong city.

FS2004 - Plain

MS2004, like Flaming Cliffs, also exhibited a performance reduction, though for this particular title the frame rate loss was more severe. These results were double-checked and stayed consistent through repeated testing.

FS2004 - High Quality

The lower frame rates continued in high quality testing, though still somewhat within the margin of testing error. To be frank, these results were somewhat surprising considering that Flight Simulator 2004 sold over 675,000 copies according to the NPD Group (compared to Pacific Fighters’ reported 41k and LOMAC’s 51k). The fact that ATI has not yet created a profile for this title in particular does not bode well for the rest of the simulation genre in terms of CrossFire compatibility. That said, Flight Simulator 2004 does work with the SuperAA modes (described below), so while CrossFire currently degrades performance by a significant margin the dual-board solution does lend some benefit by means of improved image quality.

Chaos Theory was tested using the Lighthouse demo. The shader profile for SM2.0 was used and options such as parallax mapping and high quality soft shadows were enabled.

Chaos Theory - Plain

Halfway through our game benchmarking we finally come upon a title that scales with the dual-card solution. Worth noting is that Chaos Theory shows a 50% performance gain at 1024x768, yet as the resolution increase shifted the workload more onto the graphics subsystem CrossFire saw an almost 100% gain over single-card testing.

Chaos Theory - High Quality

High quality testing likewise shows similar scaling, with a slightly stronger comparative score at the lower resolution due to the use of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. At 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 CrossFire was just a few frames short of doubling the single-card's frame rate. These are the sort of tangible performance gains one should expect from an expensive, high-end graphics configuration.

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