CrossFire™ - Reviews

Overall
Performance
SuperAA
Game Compatibility
Card Flexibility
Radeon™ Xpress 200 CrossFire

Game Compatibility

Andreas Schilling, Hardwareluxx, Germany
"The biggest positive thing is the support for any 3D-game."

Overclockers.ru
"It's important to notice than CrossFire supports all 3D games at a time that SLI followers have to wait for driver support for latest games, then tinker around with versions and profiles."

"… it should provide instant compatibility with current and upcoming games, and offer new AA modes for most quality demanding users …."

HardOCP.com
"Frankly, when SLI was announced support was quite scarce for games that actually showed a benefit with the technology. The main problem with NVIDIA’s technology has been the fact that it relies on driver profiles in order for a game to see any kind of benefit from SLI. These profiles are programmed with the best mode of SLI for each game to deliver the best performance without causing any problems. Unfortunately, NVIDIA has to test every single game to find these best modes and implement them into the drivers. They also have to stay on the backs of game content developers to make sure games utilize SLI correctly and to their best potential without breaking other things. As you can imagine, this can be a very long and daunting task. As such, the potential for long intervals between support for new games in new driver releases is a real possibility."

"In a departure from NVIDIA’s driver-specific implementation of dual graphics, the entire basis of ATI’s new multiple graphics card technology is a non-reliance on any type of driver game profiles. This is a huge burden off the shoulders of gamers and ATI themselves in that they do not have to rely on individual game profiles. We’ll talk about this more later in the preview."

"We talked in the introduction about the fact that CrossFire does not rely on gaming profiles. What this means is that ATI does not have to wait for driver updates to support their multiple video card advantage in new and even old games. CrossFire is a feature that you simply enable and it just works, with no fuss or worry about what mode a game uses or if it has a driver profile or not. This is a good thing for gamers out there because we all don’t just play the latest and greatest games."

"Being able to simply turn on multi VPU and start gaming without having to worry about anything is what gamers want. When we start up a game, we don’t want to have to worry about if there is a profile built into the driver for that game and if we need to experiment with different rendering modes. We want instant and automatic action. ATI seems poised to deliver this to gamers."

TechReport.com
" CrossFire's ability to fall back on scissor and supertiling modes when it encounters a game that it doesn't have an Alternate Frame Rendering profile for is unique. This gives CrossFire the potential to accelerate any Direct3D or OpenGL game, although fine-tuned AFR profiles may ultimately offer superior performance. NVIDIA continues to add new SLI game profiles to its drivers, but it can't match CrossFire's automatic compatibility."

FiringSquad.com
"The one key downside to NVIDIA SLI however has been application support. NVIDIA’s driver team has been busy literally optimizing individual games for SLI. In our original SLI Performance Preview from November, we noted three games that didn’t take advantage of SLI: Lock On: Modern Air Combat, Unreal Tournament 2004, and the original Splinter Cell (as well as its follow-up Pandora Tomorrow). Since then, NVIDIA has only reworked their SLI driver to take advantage of one of these three games, LOMAC."

HotHardware.com
" In any case this, in our opinion, is a huge selling point for CrossFire. While NVIDIA's Driver Team is doing a fairly good job of enabling SLI for many current and new titles, the list of supported games isn't exhaustive, as it is with ATi's new multi-GPU technology."

GamingNexus.com
" Did I just say all applications? NVIDIA’s solution forces you to have a profile for each game you want and there are still plenty that aren’t supported. ATI’s method allows for acceleration in all games and applications."