Crossfire review... dosn't look great

[adz]

i just looked at the review of 2 850xt on a crossfire motherboard caompared to 7800gtx sli... IMO ati gets kicked at least in this review(thg) but from what they write seems like they are making crossfire look better then what actually is at the moment.. what do u guys think?

[Martijn]

Got a link?

[cadaveca]

i think your comparo's are fawked becasue the x850 is not the same gen as the 7800GTX...try x850 and Crossfire and 6800U's and SLi...then you have a decent comparo. Damn hardware sites are biased...every single one.

Links:
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?cat=grfx&id=404&pagenumber=1

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/crossfire/

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/09/26/ati_crossfire_detail/1.html

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/crossfireatireviewxxx/

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=168

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articleid=730&cid=2

http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xMjE2

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q3/ati-crossfire/index.x?pg=1







:toast:

[adz]

Got a link?

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050926/index.html

[Vapor]

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050926/index.htmlWell isn't THAT a fair review :rolleyes:

[Ugly n Grey]

it's on the main page of THG...

I think the review speaks favourably to ATI to be honest, if a pair of 850's can even BE compared to a pair of 7800's.... that comparison sure doesn't work in single card mode, why would it work in SLI? Another Dissapointing THG (Tom Has Gonorrhea) review .....

IF you take the data on it's own without the comparison, at least you know what you are getting...

The 850's were beaten like an ugly step child

[adz]

we'll see when the new ati come's out...

[Vapor]

My conclusion is that a single GTX is as good as X850XTs in CF and will have the same playable settings.

Benchmarks gain from the second card, as expected. But at that point two GTs would cost less (two GTXs might as well if you already have an NF4SLi board).

[Vapor]

we'll see when the new ati come's out...In the meantime, this is their showcase technology.

[adz]

GT's are @ 382€ and GTX's @ 442... :slobber: :slobber:

[cadaveca]

Yeah, i can't wait to see an impartial review. :rolleyes: THG even made sure to choose pictures from 3dmark05 with ATI having higher framerates...the thing most people will look at, without reading what's there. :rolleyes:

Now, I'm Canadian, and I can't help but be an ATI fanboy, but all of these reviews are ridiculous. :fact: Wait a couple of weeks so that real people who actually pay for thier cards start posting thier own reviews, and we shall see who wins.

In direct comparisons, the x850 should be faster then the 6800U SLi. But in some situations, a single 7800GTX is faster than 6800U sli... :D

[Vapor]

And an X850XTpe is at $310, X850XTCF is at $500 (according to ATi) and a board is at $150 (I'm being nice here).

[Vapor]

Yeah, i can't wait to see an impartial review. :rolleyes: THG even made sure to choose pictures from 3dmark05 with ATI having higher framerates...the thing most people will look at, without reading what's there. :rolleyes:

Now, I'm Canadian, and I can't help but be an ATI fanboy, but all of these reviews are ridiculous. :fact: Wait a couple of weeks so that real people who actually pay for thier cards start posting thier own reviews, and we shall see who wins.

In direct comparisons, the x850 should be faster then the 6800U SLi. But in some situations, a single 7800GTX is faster than 6800U sli... :DIf I were exclusively a gamer, I'd only listen to [H], they test for playable settings, which should be the important part. If I were exclusively a benchmarker, I'd listen to us :D

[adz]

I'd listen to us :D :toast: this sounds right!

[Ugly n Grey]

Like always, let's see what folks have to say, we all vote with our dollars.... if you buy the master card, why would you need and ATI chipset? I thought this was supposed to work on anything ?

[Comp-Freak]

X850XT CF is as fast as 6800Ultra SLI, sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

Dutch review: http://www.hardware.info/reviews.php?id=603

[Vapor]

Is it just me or does CrossFire crap out at higher settings? Seems that the SLi solutions pull away at hi-res and with AA/AF enabled.

[cadaveca]

Yeah, but still no cards do AA and HDR...my biggest problem.

The r520 better be what i hope it is.


Why we have apps with HDR and no card that support it properly is beyond me. The tech is not new, dammit! :mad:

:banana:

[Vapor]

HDR + SSAA is entirely possible, just no card is good enough. Valve's implementation of HDR will be compatible with regular old AA and SM2.0b cards and looks even better than the other implementations we've seen so far (IMO). I have little doubt that Valve's implementation will perform quite well on CF ;)

[DavidHull]

THG does seem to have some unbiased reviews, especially of LCDs, but, I'm sorry, any review that ends with, "CrossFire is Multi-GPU ready! Are you ready to jump into the CrossFire?" had to have been co-written by ATI.

I want the crossfire platform to be good, to stimulate competition, but how they pulled anything close to a win for ATI, out of this review, stretches what can honestly be pulled from ones ass.

Dave

[cadaveca]

HDR + SSAA is entirely possible, just no card is good enough. Valve's implementation of HDR will be compatible with regular old AA and SM2.0b cards and looks even better than the other implementations we've seen so far (IMO). I have little doubt that Valve's implementation will perform quite well on CF ;)
You realize that valve's implementation involves 4 different versions of every texture for differnt lighting situations? And this is the reason why it took so long for DOD:S to come out? it's not hardware HDR, in any true sense, by any means. :fact:

Take one texture, add the shading for global lighting, and you have HDR...not take 4 textures, blend them, to get the approximate lighting and overexpose it... :stick:


Don't get me wrong, valve has come up with an amazing alternate to rendering HDR in hardware, but this is not hardware HDR w/AA. Wait until this afternoon, if you have the game, and you shall see what i mean. Then try Farcry, and enable AA and HDR...what happens? :slap: I am very unimpressed with the current products on the market. :fact:

[Vapor]

I did not realize that, thanks :D

But as I said before, you can have AA + HDR if you like slideshows....SSAA can absolutely be run with current implementations of hardware HDR but it's slow as snails. MSAA + HDR is something that is being worked on by both companies and I don't expect to see it for quite some time and I would not get your hopes up if I were you. :(

[cadaveca]

"ring-bus", if it does what i think it does, would allow for it. The way textures are rendered to the final frame is what makes AA and true HDR impossible, and it possible with SSAA, but that's not even real AA anyway, so I don't follow your point. I would like FULL SCENE ANTIALIASING. it's not happening now, so the best i got is hope.

At least you understand why even 2 7800GTX'es are not fast enough yet...and are pure crap.

[perkam]

Pls take note that some review websites are using higher fsaa settings for the X850s than the 6800Us and the 7800s...[H] is a good example of this, look closely at the left side of the tables.

Perkam

[Vapor]

SSAA is full-scene :D, it's the old complicated kind though that looks better and takes lots more GPU power, it's not the Matrox FAA.

[cadaveca]

Um, SSAA was on matrox cards since at least 2002....

[Vapor]

SuperSampling is the best kind of FullScene AA, much better than MultiSampling.....Matrox does FAA (fragment AA). SS renders EVERYTHING at 4x the res and then samples down while MS uses a rotated pixel grid, IIRC.

[cadaveca]

uh, no, this card did SSAA in 2002...notice ho familiar it looks to current cards... :stick:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=37598


EDIT, and here's Matrox's press tech document...on antialiasing, dated 2002...
http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/tech_info/pdfs/parhelia/faa_16x.pdf

FSAA - Supersampling
Supersampling renders an entire frame to a higher resolution and then uses the extra pixel data to obtain an improved display output. For example, 2x supersampling renders a frame to twice its required size in order to obtain two sub-pixel samples per output pixel; 4x FSAA renders a scene at four times its required size; etc. The extra pixel samples derived from supersampling are combined using filtering to produce a blended output that has a softening effect along aliased edges.

[Vapor]

That's why Matrox calls it FAA (http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/parhelia512/technology/faa16x.cfm) :stick: No doubt that card does SSAA, but it's full scene. nV's 8x AA is SSAA.

[Vapor]

Look, SSAA has been around as long as AA has been around, it's the original AA. FAA is an improved version of that (rendering only the edges at 2x the size) and MSAA is an alternative to it. MSAA and SSAA are both full scene while FAA isn't.

[cadaveca]

um, ok, how come AA and HDR don't work with farcry then?

You've got to understand that the current SSAA that is being touted is not the same as the original one implemented by matrox, at least to my understanding, and that there are differnt forms of SSAA.

PLease show me a sample off true AA(a byproduct of ansioscopic filtering, actually) and HDR, i'd honestly like to see it. I'm not challenging you, but i have yet to find one myself. maybe you can point me in the right direction?

Now FSAA and SSAA are not the same, and becasue of the some of the implemetations, which even sometimes rotate textures slightly for blending, which leads to "feathering" at the edge of textures. This "feathering" is why ATI has a better rep for quality and AA than nVidia does.

[Vapor]

Open up farcry with your 7800GTX, enable HDR (however it gets enabled, I don't like the way FC HDR looks) and force 8x TR SSAA in the control panel. That's your example.

As I said before, SSAA+HDR is entirely possible but slow as :banana::banana::banana::banana:. MSAA+HDR is NOT possible because the rotated grid can't be used (for unknown reason to me).

SSAA is the original AA, how it is implemented might be slightly different (different scaling mechanisms, that's all) but it's still the same concept: render a larger scene and scale it down. MSAA rotates the pixel grid, that's how it works.

[cadaveca]

lol transparancy SSAA? that's not AA...at least not to me.

[Vapor]

The transparency is optional. SSAA + HDR is possible dude, that's something that's known. SSAA is full scene as well, that's known.

[cadaveca]

Well, now let's review what David Kirk (some important guy @ nVidia)has to say about the matter...

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2005/07/11/nvidia_rsx_interview/1.html


Using AA with HDR

For those of you with super-duper graphics cards, you will have come across a problem: you can't use Anti-Aliasing when using HDR lighting, for example in Far Cry. In these cases, it's a situation where you have to choose one or the other. Why is this, and when is the problem going to get solved?

"OK, so the problem is this. With a conventional rendering pipeline, you render straight into the final buffer - so the whole scene is rendered straight into the frame buffer and you can apply the AA to the scene right there."

"But with HDR, you render individual components from a scene and then composite them into a final buffer. It's more like the way films work, where objects on the screen are rendered separately and then composited together. Because they're rendered separately, it's hard to apply FSAA (note the full-screen prefix, not composited-image AA! -Ed) So traditional AA doesn't make sense here."

So if it can't be done in existing hardware, why not create a new hardware feature of the graphics card that will do both?

"It would be expensive for us to try and do it in hardware, and it wouldn't really make sense - it doesn't make sense, going into the future, for us to keep applying AA at the hardware level. What will happen is that as games are created for HDR, AA will be done in-engine according to the specification of the developer.

"Maybe at some point, that process will be accelerated in hardware, but that's not in the immediate future."

But if the problem is the size of the frame buffer, wouldn't the new range of 512MB cards help this?

"With more frame buffer size, yes, you could possibly get closer. But you're talking more like 2GB than 512MB."






So what was that you were saying? :confused:

I WANT FSAA!!.


:toast:

[Vapor]

The only way to do it is to render the full scene with HDR at a much larger resolution and then scale it down....that's what I was talking about. That's where 2GB comes from--it's a TON of memory. It goes back to what I was saying--it's possible but slow as :banana::banana::banana::banana:.

[Vapor]

Either way, it's not something we're getting any time soon, like I said in post 22.


And....we.....have....completely.....hijacked..... this.....thread.

[cadaveca]

So...it doesn't work...:stick:...as I said ealier...:stick:


:confused:

Uh, meds?

:D

:toast:


And sry, buit no hijack, i said it dodn't work..lol..and that's how i feel about those reviews...they don't work. Why? notice how the cards are not for sale yet? So how come these people got cards? Where do you think they got them from? Favortism? :stick:

[.sentinel]

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050926/index.html
I can't count how many things are wrong with that review.
Different RAM
Last gen videocard aganist this gen video card.
Also different cooler.

Thats NOT how you review.

[JuanFlaiter]

I´m right now testing CrossFire (received the review kit today, nice timing :( ). The board looks nice, it has up to 4vDimm, 2.05vCore, nice heatsinks, good dividers.

I think this can be a good platform, specially for us, overclockers :)

BTW: I´ll be using a couple of 6800GT (would love to use 6800u, but I have none in hand) for the comparison. Using a pair of 7800GTX, 10 days before ATI launches it´s new generation video cards, I think is quite biased.

[mcnbns]

When looking at the performance on the various engines, we can see that the rest of the scores are from games doing what they do best: playing. CrossFire in Unreal Tournament almost runs at the same average frame rate as the SLI test system. We are not sure if this can be attributed to the X850 card's native performance in this benchmark, or better utilization of the combined output of the cards.
^ I think you can attribute that to UT2004 is limited by CPU, not GPU. :rolleyes:

I can't believe I read that whole review. THG = Tom's Hardware Gayness.

[DilTech]

Yeah, but still no cards do AA and HDR...my biggest problem.

The r520 better be what i hope it is.


Why we have apps with HDR and no card that support it properly is beyond me. The tech is not new, dammit! :mad:

:banana:

Download the serious sam II demo, AA + HDR work at the same time, and is fully playable at 1280x960(doesn't do 1280x1024 for some ungodly reason) on my 6800gt at 4xAA... Dips down to 30, but I can live with that.

:woot: :banana: :banana:

[cadaveca]

yep tried it...that's HDR?? Like DOD:S HDR? lol.

[brandinb]

Pls take note that some review websites are using higher fsaa settings for the X850s than the 6800Us and the 7800s...[H] is a good example of this, look closely at the left side of the tables.

Perkam

im thinking your not aware of how hard ocp benches cards. they bench vid cards based on best playable settigs. why? because the only point of a "faster" video card is to turn on more settings. well the hard benching the ati cards at higher aa means what?? that they are faster in that circumstance of course and thats a good thing.
basically hard shows you how high of settings that the cards can play your games smoothly at. to me nothing is more importiant then this (benching for fun aside) and it is the best way to review cards.

imo crossfire doing 1600x1200@60hz max is fricken ridiculous id like to say. why spend so much money on graphics and be limited to 60 visible fps and 1600x1200 when most current cards do that in single configuration. because of that i would never buy or recomend crossfire in its current form. dual r520 wont have this problem though. i laugh at anyone who buys current xfire technology for gaming purposes. for benching it looks really good!! so bench on!

[adz]

It is very hard for us to support Super AA having seen the abysmal performance scaling we have shown here. With single cards using 4x and 6x AA more than doubling the performance of CrossFire with 8/10x and 12/14x AA, we can't understand why anyone would suffer the performance hit. In order for this to actually be useful, users would need to be monitor limited to 1280x1024 or below - in which case a CrossFire purchase is severely misplaced. At the high end, it is hard for us to believe that an increase in resolution to 1920x1440 (or even higher) would have as much of a performance hit. Maintaining a standard AA level on a high resolutions will likely provide better image quality than a low resolution with Super AA. It is also probable that performance would decrease less when scaling resolution beyond 1600x1200 than when enabling Super AA. Unfortunately, we don't even have the ability to test this theory properly with current hardware and drivers.

Despite exceptional performance at its target resolutions, we have to strongly recommend against the purchase of an X800/X850 series CrossFire card. (You also would probably need a motherboard upgrade for Crossfire anyway, making it even less attractive.) We have a hard time recommending all but the absolute top end NVIDIA 7800 GTX SLI as a viable solution. As an upgrade path, it makes generally much more sense to buy the next single card solution that comes out instead of spending money on older technology that won't scale as well, takes up a lot of space, eats up a lot of power, and likely incorporates fewer features. The only way we truly say that multi-GPU technology is a better solution than a similarly classed single card solution (even when upgrading from one card to two) is at the absolute highest end where there is no competition from a single card. And right now the king of the mountain is still a 7800 GTX SLI. But just how long will that last? Only time can tell.


This from anand works.. ;)