X-bit labs

Two vs. Three: Zotac GeForce 9800 GX2 Against 3-Way CrossFire ATI Radeon HD 3870 (page 8)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 04/04/2008 | 12:18 PM ]

Call of Juarez

The in-game benchmarking tools do not support 2560x1600 resolution, and we had to limit our test to 1920x1200.

Nvidia’s solutions have problems with memory management and ATI’s 3-way configuration enjoys a tremendous advantage. Its performance fluctuates rather too much at resolutions above 1280x1024, making the gameplay not quite comfortable while the Zotac GeForce 9800 GX2 also delivers an acceptable speed at 1280x1024.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

CrossFireX technology doesn’t work well here. It brings about no performance benefits with two GPUs and results in a performance hit with more GPUs. That’s a fault of the software part of the system which, according to ATI/AMD itself, does not support OpenGL applications as yet.

The scalability problem of CrossFireX technology is not due to the game engine or the principles of modern multi-GPU systems because the Zotac GeForce 9800 GX2 delivers superb performance, allowing to play this game even at 2560x1600 with 4x FSAA.