Quality
We've seen what Crossfire has to offer in terms of performance. Now let's look what it can offer in terms of quality - Super Anti Aliasing. In theory, Super AA 8x and 12x performance with Crossfire should be very close to 4x AA and 6x AA performance with a single card. But what's more interesting here is actually Super AA 10x and 14x performance - does the use of 2x super sampling have any effect on performance? Let's start with Call of Duty.
Call of Duty - Dawnville, 1024 x 768
Radeon X1900XTX
Radeon X1900 Crossfire
Radeon X1900 Crossfire, Super AA
Call of Duty - Dawnville, 1280 x 1024
Radeon X1900XTX
Radeon X1900 Crossfire
Radeon X1900 Crossfire, Super AA
Call of Duty - Dawnville, 1600 x 1200
Radeon X1900XTX
Radeon X1900 Crossfire
Radeon X1900 Crossfire, Super AA
We can see from the results in the graphs above that enabling Super AA does indeed incur some overhead - roughly 2 - 3 fps worth in this game. Since the performance increase from using a Crossfire setup is not that significant, you might want to consider using Super AA to boost image quality instead. You already have very high frame rates here, so why not push image quality up a notch. It's unfortunate we can't show you what Super AA has to offer, but we think image quality is noticeably better with Super AA - particularly with Super AA 10x or 14x. With frame rates that high, Super AA 14x is the way to go. There's not point of using 10x since you only gain 4 - 7 fps.
Remember what we're interested in? That's right - whether or not there's a penalty with enabling the additional 2x super sampling. Hmmm, looks like there are none .Could it be that 2x super sampling is 'free' with Crossfire? We think so. If this is the case, than this is another advantage it has over NVIDIA's SLI. Let's take a look at the other games to be sure.
[Previous Page]
[Go to top]
[Next Page]