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Need for Speed: Carbon runs well on AMD Radeon cards and runs very well with Crossfire. Looking at these results, you might be tempted to play at 1600 x 1200 with two Radeon X1950 Pro. However, we found you'll want to have minimum frame rates higher 35 to 40 fps and average fps higher than 50 fps if you want a fluid gameplay experience with this game.


NFS: Carbon - Lincoln Boulevard Sprint 1024
(click here for a more detailed graph)

	Crossfire	Single X1950 Pro
<30 fps	0	0
30-45 fps	0	60
45-60 fps	0	43
60-90 fps	88	0
90-120 fps	6	0
>120 fps	0	0
Total	94	93

results are in seconds

Since this results are taken during gameplay testing sessions, they are not totally the same, some variances between runs are present. But the general trend is unmistakable - Crossfire allows you to experience much higher frame rate through the whole game. Instead of experiencing the game at around 45 fps with a single Radeon X1950 Pro, a pair of them will be able to boost your frame rate to around 70 fps. is not a replay, That is a significant improvement.

Conclusion:

Undoubtedly, AMD's multi rendering solution - Crossfire - can still deliver very significant gains in frame rates compared to a single card setup. In that regard, AMD were able to keep their promise of potential significant performance gains with Crossfire. However, we found this third revision of Crossfire is not without its share of problems. True, installation is simpler and less of a hassle with two internal bridge connectors. But our experience with mixed vendor setups is very much a disappointment. Remember, one of the biggest advantage Crossfire has (and one which AMD touts repeatedly) is the ability to run mixed vendor cards or different cards together without any problems. That didn't happen this time around.

If you're going to install Crossfire, we recommend you go with identical cards - much like NVIDIA's SLI. Gone is the advantage for Crossfire. Now, you're faced with another problem - a problem that only AMD can fix - drivers. As we said earlier, we encountered problems with F.E.A.R, Quake 4, Oblivion and GTR2 that makes using a Crossfire setup for playing games a moot point. Sure, performance is significantly higher with Quake 4 and Oblivion, but reloading a game just because of a driver problem is not something any gamer should put up with. To be fair, Quake 4 is a slightly less severe matter, since the performance hit only occur with system changes. Of course, there are those who prefer to use Crossfire to 'max out' image quality settings. Performance issues will likely not be much of concern in this type of setups, however you're still likely to encounter problems if you use cards from different vendors or make.

Hopefully, AMD will be able to iron out this issues with driver updates. However, considering the problems and issues we encountered today, we could not find ourselves to recommend Crossfire as a gaming solution at this time. Yes, the potential performance gains are significant, but we think ATI should've done better. Issues with cards with different BIOSes, flaky compatibility - these are issues that was not a problem with previous versions of Crossfire and we couldn't help but think they didn't think things through with the move to an internal bridge connector.


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