Back to Page 4 Throwing caution out into the swimming pool, I powered on. And miracles of miracles, the blue lights on the case front started blinking, I had hard drive activity! Some white letters flew by on the monitor and I was at a prompt. I couldn’t believe my good fortune, but right […]
Back to Page 3 I thought about the case and the fact that it only had one fan, a 120mm back blower. I knew that computers built up heat and that heat must be bad, otherwise there would be no market for coolers. So as long as I was going to the computer store, […]
Back to Page 2 Even so, more time passed before I took action on my decision. The turning point proved to be a discussion I had with a trusted friend and computer guru (who is not a family member), a guy who had has helped several others build their own rigs. I loved the […]
Back to Page 1 The previous year, before I was even a twinkle in the eye of SimHQ’s Staff, I had won a site contest and these items were the Grand Prize. I couldn’t believe it at the time, I had never won anything worthwhile in my entire life. Two weeks later, a box […]
by Tom “20mm” Hayden “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Tom.”It was late on a Saturday afternoon and my first home-built computer had just spoken to me. I found myself spinning further into the abyss of lunacy that had begun with ordering the components two weeks prior, and before I could evaluate the reasonableness of […]
Back to Page 6 Conclusion CrossFire performance is certainly something of a mixed bag, at least from the perspective of SimHQ’s benchmark suite. The gains exhibited by Chaos Theory and Call of Duty 2 bodes extremely well for CrossFire’s potential for performance improvement in titles that have been profiled by ATI’s driver team (both […]
Back to Page 5 SuperAA Testing Radeon graphics boards have offered a maximum of 6x multi-sampling anti-aliasing since the 9700 Pro. Yet for CrossFire ATI has increased the end users AA options to include additional samples. Once CrossFire is enabled the Catalyst driver panel’s slider shows added options for 8x, 10x, 12x and 14x […]
Back to Page 4 Call of Duty 2 was tested with a custom demo from the Prisoners of War single-player map. The game was configured in its DX9 rendering mode with all texture options manually set at high. As with Chaos Theory, Call of Duty 2 exhibits very strong performance gains with CrossFire enabled, with […]
Back to Page 3 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. MS2004, like Flaming Cliffs, also exhibited a performance reduction, though for […]
Back to Page 2 Benchmark Test Scores SimHQ included Futuremark’s 3DMark05 for examining the theoretical raster and shader performance characteristics of these graphics boards. The individual fill rate (multi-texturing) and pixel and vertex (complex) shader tests were ran at the program’s default resolution of 1024×768. Power X1800 XT CrossFire Fill Rate 9811 MT/s 19576 MT/s Pixel […]
Back to Page 1 The Sound and The Fury While the thought of the rendering capabilties from having two high-end graphics boards such as the Radeon X1800 XT installed should be enough to whet the appetite of most hardcore sim-heads or PC gamers, environmental issues in the form of undesirable power usage and/or sound […]
by John Reynolds Introduction When ATI launched CrossFire, their first dual-card graphics solution last fall, some were left scratching their heads over a few of its limitations. Using an external, single-channel DVI cable as the interconnect between the two graphics boards, Radeon X850 CrossFire configurations were unable to display a higher resolution or faster refresh […]
