Richard Burns Rally - Harwood Forest (Adaptive AA),
1024 x 768
Radeon X1900XTX
Radeon X1900 CrossFire
Richard Burns Rally - Harwood Forest (Adaptive AA),
1280 x 1024
Radeon X1900XTX
Radeon X1900 CrossFire
Richard Burns Rally - Harwood Forest (Adaptive AA),
1600 x 1200
Radeon X1900XTX
Radeon X1900 CrossFire
Turn on adaptive anti aliasing with 'Quality' option and now we can see a stronger case for a Crossfire setup. Right off the bat, at 1024 x 768 we can already see quite a huge gain with a Crossfire setup - roughly 15 percent in 4x AA and 50 percent in 6x AA. At higher resolutions, the difference grew to about 70 - 80 percent at 1600 x 1200.. You only have enough processing power to run 4x adaptive anti aliasing at 1280 x 1024 with a single card, but put two Radeon X1900 together, you can push it for 6x AA at the same resolution. You might even be able to get away with 1600 x 1200 if you can stand minimum frame rates near the 30 fps mark.
There's no doubt, when Crossfire mode is enabled, you get a tremendous boost of pixel processing power. Using two Radeon X1900 cards will only make sense if you play at the highest resolution, all details maxed up with AA and AF for older games. You might even get away with enabling adaptive anti aliasing, a feature that's a tremendous burden, even for a high end card such as the Radeon X1900XTX.
Looking back to our last test, we can see a pair of Radeon X1900 behaving quite differently compared to a pair of Radeon X1600 in Crossfire mode. We didn't see any increase under default settings or even AA / AF in most cases. However, the reason is actually quite simple - we're system limited with these games. If we had used a faster processor, we will likely see the two Radeon X1900 will also offer frame rate increases across the board. So, let's test this hypothesis with games that are not system limited.
[Previous Page]
[Go to top]
[Next Page]