3DMark Vantage
Our test runs in 3DMark Vantage managed to shine some light on why the 3DMark06 numbers were a little underwhelming. Crossfire really only starts to give a significant performance boost at high resolutions and detail settings.
Running at 1280×1024, the Performance test only produced a 6% performance boost for the DIAMOND card, and an additional 27% boost with both cards in Crossfire. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but comparing those results to the near-perfect doubling in performance on the Extreme test really illustrates this point. Hopefully these numbers trend well in our real world tests.
Darkest of Days – PhysX Test
Sadly PhysX doesn’t work too well on ATI cards, since it’s an NVIDIA technology. Measures are being taken to rectify that, but for now if you are running an ATI-based video subsystem no physics acceleration for you! That is unless you find a title that supports the Havoc engine. Because of this, there was little to no difference in performance between our three test configurations in our PhysX test.
Call of Duty 4
We decided to start off with Call of Duty 4 in our real world tests of the DIAMOND 4890PE51GXOC Radeon HD 4890 video card. Though this popular DX9 title has a sequel of sorts out, it uses the same engine. As well, CoD4 still has a large audience of amateur and pro players. As for the game engine, it does have a fair degree of graphical complexity for a DX9 based engine. All our tests were performed with maximum settings at the two most frequently used wide screen LCD resolutions.
The final results showed the DIAMOND card only pulling ahead of the GIGABYTE card by 2% at both resolutions. That may sound low, but the Crossfire numbers are even lower, relatively speaking. At 1680×1050 the Crossfire rig didn’t make any appreciable difference in performance, and at 1920×1200 Crossfire producing a low 5% jump in performance.
Considering you have effectively double the video performance, this is kind of weak.
Team Fortress 2
TF2 is a credit to Steam! I’ve made this proclamation a number of times in my best Heavy impression. I do enjoy this game a lot, and the Valve twisted sense of humour tickles my funny bone regularly. I was glad to get to use this for testing. The test consisted of running a recorded match as a timedemo, with graphics settings crank up, only switching the resolution between tests. The two video cards on their own were quite close to each other in performance. Placing both in Crossfire boosted performance by 25% across the board.