Citation :HARDiNFO World Exclusive: ATI Crossfire Benchmarks
ATI Crossfire Benchmarks @ DFI Booth

HARDiNFO has in conjunction withTweak gotten an exclusive oppertunity to test ATIs new Crossfire platform. It was possible for us to join the meeting with DFI, with the assistance of Tweaktown. However, then the problem occured: Tweak had no timedemos to utilize for the test of Doom III! HARDinFO was however on the spot with our own in-game demo for Doom III, and we can now present the first performance comparison on the net, with regard to NVIDIAs SLI and ATIs Crossfire!

As mentioned before the testplatform is based on AMDs Athlon 64 4000+, 1GB DDR SDRAM (CAS2), 2 modules of ATI Radeon x850XT PE and an unknown driver version with Catalyst Control Center v. 8.15. DFIs testplatform is in fact quite similar to HARDinFOs own test configuration, therefore the test foundation could not be much better.

Since the test is not conducted in HARDiNFOs own testcenter, there was only a limited opppertunity for the configuration of tests in different software. The TFT-monitor used did not support 1600x1200 unfortunately, which is why these results are not included. We apologize for the lack of results and infos – we might be reviewing this mini-test later, if we succeed in getting more results.

Here you can see a picture of HARDiNFOs Jon Fabricius to the left, and TweakTowns Editor, Asher Moses to the left. We would also like to make a sepcial thanks to TFI for giving us exclusive rights to benchmarke the platform at the Computex Taipei 2005.

**The DFI Crossfire platform ran on a new Catalyst Driver with support for Crossfire Multi VPU – the version is unknown, the driver is not yet official.

Then something impossible happened! ATI Crossfire is exceeding NVIDIAs flagshib – and even on NVIDIAs homebase – in Doom 3 ATI x850XTPE a total 75-90 % of extra performance in Crossfire mode (2 modules of x850XTPE kort), and thereby conquiering the first place in 3 of the figures. The results from 3Dmark 2005 has been included for those who are interested. Since we have not tested NVIDIAs SLI in 3Dmark 2005, the ATI results must stand alone for now.

These numbers are quite interesting due to certain reasons: One thing is that ATI lies ahead, something else is that how much extra performance there actually is to get in ATIs Multi VPU mode – something could indicate of a better optimization in contrast to NVIDIAs SLI. In summary, due to the fact that this all happens on NVIDIAs playground with Doom3, only adds to the damage.

Unfortunately, we must wait for some time to make more benchmark previews until the NDA expires later this month, but we already have a deal ready by a retail.