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ATI Radeon X1950 XTX/CrossFire 512MB Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 30 August 2006 |
Last week we took a look at the performance of ATI's latest graphics card, the Radeon X1950 XTX and found the card to be a more than capable performer, in fact it delivered the best performance of any GPU we checked so far. Despite this however, the title of fastest graphics card still belonged to the dual-GPU GeForce 7950 GX2. Even with its 2GHz effective GDDR4 memory modules, the Radeon X1950 XTX just couldn't keep up with the GeForce 7950 GX2. The reason why the Radeon X1950 XTX performs similarly to the Radeon X1900 XTX is because ATI's GDDR4 modules are operating at higher latency and/or memory timings than the GDDR3 modules used on the older Radeon X1900 XTX. - FiringSquad
 ATI Radeon X1950 XTX/CrossFire 512MB Review
Today we're taking a look at the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire edition card, the companion card of the Radeon X1950 XTX we looked at last week. The Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire shares the same clock speeds as the Radeon X1950 XTX, 650MHz core and 2.0GHz memory effective, and supports all the Radeon X1950 XTX's new features, most notably HDCP support and the Radeon X1950 XTX's new heatpipe cooling. In comparison to previous CrossFire boards, ATI's made no changes to the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire, the board relies on the same compositing engine and dongle system.
So we are going check the performance delivered by the Radeon X1950 XTX in CrossFire against the GeForce 7900 GTX and GeForce 7950 GX2 in SLI and Quad Sli respectively. When the two cards are run under equal workloads, NVIDIA's Quad SLI GeForce 7950 GX2 outperforms the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire setup. The actual amount varies from game-to-game. We should also note that the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire combo managed to pull a little further away from the Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire in comparison to the single GPU benchmarks. So the Radeon X1950 XTX has an extra edge with CrossFire.
That about does it for our first look into the Radeon X1950 XTX and X1950 XTX CrossFire. If ATI can deliver on their price and availability figures for the cards they should prove to be pretty popular among ATI enthusiasts. We'd also like to see ATI offer CrossFire users the ability to create game profiles for specific games. Right now you really can't tweak CrossFire support in the Catalyst driver, either the game works or it doesn't. Fortunately, CrossFire compatibility is improving, and obviously if the game doesn't scale you've always got the option of Super AA, it's here where CrossFire certainly delivers...
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