Date:
Sunday , January 08, 2006
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation

X1800 XT CrossFire is finally here and inside we will show you how it performs in eight games compared to the competition. In this no holds barred fight for gaming domination, who will come out on top?

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System Test Setup:

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 FX-55

Motherboards

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe and ATI RD480 Reference Motherboard

System Memory

4 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro

Hard Drive

Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150

OS

Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c

For our system platform setup, we are using the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe for the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB single and SLI video cards. For the X1800 XT in single card and dual-card CrossFire mode, we are using a reference ATI RD480 CrossFire motherboard. Both motherboards have the exact same amount of RAM and use the same FX-55 CPU.

Video Cards:

Make & Model

Platform

Core Clock (MHz)

Memory Clock (GHz)

Driver Version

Notes

Radeon X1800 XT Slave and Master Card 512MB

PCI-E

625

1.5G

Catalyst 5.12

WHQL

GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB Single and SLI

PCI-E

540

1.7

ForceWare 81.95

WHQL

Game and Video Card Evaluation Setup

The goal of this comparison is to evaluate the best of the best that ATI and NVIDIA have to offer in single and dual-card configurations. This means we’ll compare a single X1800 XT to a single GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB, and we’ll compare them in dual-card configurations as well. Therefore, we are using a single X1800 XT 512MB video card and an X1800 XT 512MB Master Card for dual card operation. We are using two reference GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB video cards in single and SLI operation.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We use a high performance system with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

In our graphs, we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF used.

AD AA = Adaptive AA – Indicates the use of ATI’s Adaptive AA on X1000 series video cards.

HQ AF = High Quality Anisotropic Filtering – Indicates the use of ATI’s High Quality option for Anisotropic Filtering that is not angle dependent.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Anti-aliasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Anti-aliasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.