I knew it. CrossFire does look good, but I am waiting until I've seen benchmarks for it. I am very excited by the prospect of CrossFire, but I'm slightly worried that it might not support all games. I'm going to pick some random games out of the hat, along with the usual suspects, come benchmarking time.
Froggy, any current game that can benefit from SLI (ie, doesn't already get 8000fps out of sheer oldness) pretty much does. And I'm sure ATI will have some games where rendering gets wierd and will need a driver fix. nVidia has a tool available to set SLI modes for new games so you can set them up before the next driver is out. I voted wait and see what happens, but ATI's is a messy external solution, whereas nvidia's is nice and internal and much more mature, even if it does have a couple kinks. Of course I have to be biased towards nvidia because I've invested about a grand in SLI, but even still I've found their products better for this generation because of SM3.0 support and whatnot.
I might not have got the point quite right., but I was under the impression that the impressive bit of ATI's solution was the SuperAA modes. There's a lot of really old games out there which won't benifit a bit from dual graphics cards, because they already run max-detail/speed on a bottom end card. What ATI seem to think they can do is make these games look better by doing clever stuff that I don't compleatly follow but seems to involve rendering at twice the res and shrinking the result. That said, the big fight will be: are a pairt of X850XT PE's (or whatever) faster than a pair of 6800U's? which is cheaper? and which is more compatable? both in terms of the motherboard needed and the software that will run on it. Personally my money would go on ATi right now, but nVidia are good at inovating. I'm not planning a major upgrade for a year or two so I'm just gonna sit back and watch the fan boys bitch at each other
That's a good point, and that is more of a reason to use real-world apples to oranges run throughs. If you can make a game look better without losing playability... that is what is important.
The idea of having two GPU's does sound quite nice, but i'm not really a big fan of having two cards, especially with external connections like the ATI ones. Whens the first dual core GPU or pair of GPUs on a single card going to be coming about, then I might get pretty interested. As for the performance, I prefer ATI's idea on the whole enhancing old games, as i'm a great fan of the good old original counterstrike. It seems a logical step to get the cards working with the current games before launching. It seems to me that NVidia launched before the technology was fully known and withought complete planning. There are still several dissapointing factors about compatability between cards that should be able to be run in SLI which ATI say they have sorted.
Dunno how much superaa could do for older games. Any game not demanding enough to allow you to use it will probably have crap textures and models, and you can't do anything about that. Cleaning up the aliasing would help a bit, but I've run HL1 at completely maxxed settings, and at 1600x1200 4xAA there's no noticible aliasing (I'm sure if you take a screenie and then zoom in 8x there's something to be seen, but who gives a crap, you don't play games like that), but the graphics still look ass-tastic. Realistically smoothing things out even more would probably make the bad textures and models stick out that much more. Again, I'll need to see it in action, but my pair of 6800GTs (at Ultra) let me run HL2/CS:S 1600x1200 4xAA 8-16xAF perfectly playably, and they have textures that would allow me to determine the image quality based on the jaggies (which I'm devoid of). When Crossfire can revamp dated textures on the fly, I'll be impressed.
mrs.apple: Jack, the report you handed in was good but Jill's report had an extra section that really made it shine when i read it. So im going to give her the golden star Jack: But mrs.apple! my NEXT report will include the section Jill's report had and more! give me the star! but really, both look nice, neither are for me, i would rather get a new card then add a second because new technology advances would force me. also i dont have that kind of money for the cards or the motherboard. but if i did, i would go nvidia, since i cant trust ati.
ok im going to have to go with Sli since gigabyte have just showed off a daul sli board with 4 , yes 4 PCi-express slots as well as the new dual dual gpu cards. That would let you have 8 GPUs and 2gb of graphic memory [coughs]shhhh [/coughs] .....frank
ever hear of dual 6600GT's my man? or not... thats like say... like saying.. something kompletly retarded
yes, I added a couple of options that would help to balance out the rush created by ATI's paper launch. CrossFire sounds great on paper, but as I reported earlier today: NVIDIA has features left in the tank for SLI, so I don't think the battle is over yet and I want to see real benchmarks in real games before I make the decision as to whether CrossFire is better than SLI or vice versa.
two things the dual-gpu cards don't have an SLI connector, so you can't link two (or four of them up) SLI graphics memory is NOT cumulative! A pair of 256MB cards is still 256MB effective graphics memory. And you'd need a PSU bigger even than the PC P&C 850w beast. Plus the required air conditioner and/or hanging-a-bus-radiator-out-the-window-in-a-tornado watercooling I'm still with bigz. But I'll say it again, I have to stick up for SLI as I'm heavily invested into it. Sure, one may get a few more synthetic benchmark points, but at the end of the day a pair of the best cards out there still runs games 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF no problem. The only place ATI would lose out this round is the lack of SM3.0 (and resulting eye candy), but not a whole lot of games support that anyways.
Well with rumors spreading about that SLI is being opened up to all of the major chipset makers I am leaning more and more towards SLI. Besides I have yet to see a launch date for the new ATi card and nVidia is launching the 7 series on the 21st. Also I think the NDA is supposed to be be lifted on those cards that day too. Can we expect to see some articles that day bigz? Edit: Afterthought, does anyone know enough about the nForce professional chipset to determine wether or not it could support an Athlon 64? That would provide a very interesting option, 40 PCI-E lanes. IF they could be used with Athlon 64s then it would be rather easy to set up quad sli, 8x 8x 8x 8x 4x 4x Not to mention 4 more SATA II ports would be available for RAID as well as another ethernet.
The ATI X850 XT PE pwnz the 6800 Ultra on it's own. The X850 XT PE Can even give 2x 6800 ultras a good fight. the X850 can also compete with the nvidia 7800gtx, while not being as good. ATI seem to be cn to a winner with crossfire IMHO.
Yeah x850 xt pe can compete with the 7800 gtx but it looses. So think of 7800 gtx in sli too. Now you have left that out. We'll see if the 7800 gtx in sli or the X850 XT PE is better in crossfire. Until then there is no point in makeing decisions about which of the two is better.
Guys you should not compare x850 to 7800. Compare x850 to 6800 Compare x950 (r520) to 7800. You shouldnt compare to generations, one is newer so it is more developed.
