Crossfire benchmarked, X700 and X300 too, apparently

Speaking of such things (and a little off-topic), I don't suppose you (or anyone else) has had the opportunity to pair up two 6600 non-GT's without the inter-GPU connector with NVIDIA's latest driver set yet?

I'm kind of curious as to whether they match up against my own numbers with a couple of 6600GTs.

 

None GT 6600's, when they get to 500-600-700Mhz, are terribly bandwidth limited, so I can imagine that doing tests with SLi on those would also have to take into account this also.

Did you try varying PCie speed to see if that had any influence ?

Regards

Andy

 

Nope, literally just ran it 'as is' both with and without the bridge connector.

 

Those benchmark results seem somewhat questionable, considering that in so many of the benchmarks Crossfire is so close to exactly double the performance of one board, and in some cases better.

 

Interesting analysis, Rys, thanks for taking the time. I take it that "SLI2" seems a reasonable possibility from your pov. Not being all that technical, I was approaching it from a marketing/competitive position direction now that ATI is about to be in the game, and assuming that NV would like to see three "goods" (from their pov) happen.

I saw those as:

1). Increased performance
2). Moving proprietary stuff into the mobo chipset and off the graphics card, simplifying the cards and setup/install by getting rid of the connector.
3). Given their much stronger mobo position, having a legitimate technical reason that increases performance for SLI that also makes it difficult/impossible for ATI XFire boards to work in SLI2 mobos. I don't know that moving stuff into the mobo chipset would do that, I just think NV would like it to happen, and happen in a way that would reduce criticism of them --or at least give them a decent-looking reason for it when the criticism does happen. I suppose it works the other way too, that SLI2 cards wouldn't work, or as well, in ATI mobos --and I think NV would think that just fine.

 

The connector is here to stay. There's no way you'll ever achieve the same throughput through PCI-E only in todays mobos. Maybe they'll have a few lanes dedicated solely to SLI in the next iteration, that might be the solution but could also introduce a batch of other problems.

 

So you're leaning "SLI2" is a wider intracard connector? Any other content in the "SLI2" bucket, ya think? The Inq article seems much more focused on mobo changes.

 

http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xMzUx

That was quick! I'm not going to have to sic Digi on you am I, for how it really is okay to pimp your own stuff here when it is very much on subject? Personally, one of the things I love about B3D is that everyone points at the interesting articles elsewhere. . .saves me a goodly bit of tramping about.

 

Pfffft! Rys is free to pimp HEXUS all he wants, it's a great site and I pimp it regularly myself.

There isn't anything wrong with a little pimping, as long as it's pertinant to the subject at hand. Then it sort of transcends "pimping" and becomes "informative".

Rys is almost always the latter, he's good peeps.

 

I know that. You know that. Rys apparently needs some encouragement. 8)

 

Assuming that:

1. ATI AFR doesn't introduce anamolies (obviously you can't see it without the second output).
2. hkepc's chart really does prove what they assert --that the benchies don't change for AFR in slave/slave vs master/slave even if the compositing isn't there.

Then:

Am I right in reading that 12x10 4xaa/16xaf. . .is a 50% can of whup-ass that X850 XF/AFR is opening on 6800u SLI/AFR?

Is that right? And based on your comment of 10k for 7800gtx sli in that setting, that's about 250% faster for 7800 vs 6800?

 

I see 12*10 but not 12*10 4xaa/16af.
Edit: I thought you were talking about the link from the original poster.

 

Ah. Okay. I wanted to be excited. . but the more I thot of the 7800sli vs 6800sli relationship in that graph (well, the 7800sli is stated rather than "in that graph", but you know what I mean), the more suspicious I was getting.

 

And I'm mentioned on the front page of Hexus, with no finger pointing and/or laughing involved.

My career in the graphics community can only go downhill from here.

 

The statement "The AFR-driven slave-slave is nearly twice as fast as Crossfire Supertiling" doesn't seem right to me. In that chart the X850XT CrossFire scores 3016, while in Tom's Hardwares latest VGA Charts, a single X850XT scores 3367 points at 1600x1200 with 4xAA/8xAF.

Are you sure that the 3016 score is a CrossFire (supertiling) setup? I've seen people reach around 4000 on a single X850XT PE on those settings (1280/1024 6xAA/16xAF). Or am I missing something here or completely misinterpreting the chart?