Overall
Performance
SuperAA
Game Compatibility
Card Flexibility
Radeon™ X1900
Reviews
Radeon™ X1800
Reviews
Radeon™ X1K
Reviews
CrossFire
Xpress 3200 Reviews
CrossFire
Xpress 3200 Awards
CrossFire
Xpress 1600 Reviews
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."