Gaming results
It's gaming where the Titan X1800 Fire will really shine, thanks to its CrossFired Radeon X1800 XT 512MB graphics cards.
The default test for 3DMark05 shows the benefits from switching to a dual-card setup. There's enough of a performance boost to comfortably beat out a single-card GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB card, and a pre-overclocked one at that.
Our usual Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory test, conducted at 1600x1200 with 4x AA and 8x AF, shows excellent scaling with dual Radeon X1800 XT 512MB cards in CrossFire mode.
Here's an interesting test. Black and White 2 was run at the taxing setting of 1920x1200 with 4x AA 16x AF. A single Radeon X1800 XT card (non-CrossFire) actually returns a slightly higher score, suggesting mutli-GPU overhead on a game that's limited by the CPU. Switching out the Athlon 64 4600+ for the overclocked 'FX-60 from the Armari machine and running an overclocked Radeon X1800 XT card in non-CrossFire mode returned a result of 17.2FPS, suggesting that some games benefit from beefier CPUs, even at ultra-high resolutions and image quality settings.
One of the Radeon X1000-series' key performance benefits is the ability to run antialiasing in conjunction with HDR lighting. To test the effective of a CrossFired setup, we ran Far Cry at 1600x1200 with 4x AA and 8x AF. HDR has a massive impact on framerates, once you factor in that non-HDR scores for the CrossFire setup averaged almost 100FPS. Want to know what it looks like? Head on over to here for a screengrab at 1920x1200.
