AMD's Radeon HD 6900 cards might just have been released, but it's clear that the CrossFireX component is working just fine. Sometimes, it takes a little while for drivers to be refined to the point that CrossFireX is a real option, but that's not the case here. The performance we saw throughout the article is incredible, and hard to beat.
One thing I regret not having is more comparisons to NVIDIA's cards in the same dual-GPU configuration, but that's something I'm working on remedying in the near-future. It's only fair, as it's rather difficult to compare dual-GPUs from one company to single-GPUs from another.
There are a couple of ways we can look at this, though. Both AMD and NVIDIA will offer a near 100% theoretical performance boost when combining two identical cards, and as the GeForce GTX 580 is faster than AMD's HD 5970 by about 7~10%, putting two together in SLI mode would no doubt beat two HD 6970s in CrossFireX mode. At the same time, though, two GTX 580s retail for around $1,000, compared to $740 for dual HD 5970s.
For those seeking out killer performance, but don't want to "break the bank", picking up two Radeon HD 6950s seems like a no-brainer. Simply put, the performance is incredible. It's not a great example, but compared to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580, dual HD 6950s cost a mere 20% more, but can deliver 40~80% more performance - depending on the game title or benchmark.
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