PCI Express & CrossFire: Scaling Explored

Features
By Thomas Soderstrom
published

Test Results: Unreal Tournament 3 And World In Conflict

Unreal Tournament 3 doesn’t need the power of two high-end graphics cards to get exceptional frame rates at high-resolutions and low-details, but the CrossFire advantage is still good for bragging rights. Once again, the old 975X wins because of its overclocked memory controller.

Cranking up the details does little to slow down UT3.

World In Conflict shows only the slightest CrossFire performance advantage when very low details are used.

At 2560x1600 and very high details, World In Conflict finally shows the bandwidth advantage of the P45 Express’ 2.0 slots, as compared to the 975X’s PCIe 1.1 transfers. Once again, a single x16 slot beats an x16/x4 CrossFire configuration in the P965 and P35 Express chipsets.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.
96 Comments Comment from the forums
  • badge
    Thanks for laying that information out.
    Reply
  • sparky2010
    should've included 1920x resolutions in the last page, as there are a lot of people out there with screens capable of that resolution.. but anyways, all in all a very good and informative article.. but i'm going to settle with a complete makeover when core i7 becomes more available!
    Reply
  • V3NOM
    yer kinda interesting to see how things have changed with new mobos but it doesnt really have any practical value tbh.
    Reply
  • Crashman
    V3NOMyer kinda interesting to see how things have changed with new mobos but it doesnt really have any practical value tbh.
    It's all about answering the question "Will a second card do the job".

    Lots of guys have midrange or better ATI graphics cards, and the question of "upgrade or replace" is constantly being asked.
    Reply
  • outlw6669
    Thanks for finally getting this review out!
    Reply
  • arkadi
    p45 looks grate, and the price is right.
    Reply
  • arkadi
    btw x58 is out there, just a reminder.
    Reply
  • outlw6669
    @ arkadi
    Yes the x58 is out.
    However, as it can not be paired with a Core 2 CPU and runs DDR3 exclusively, you can not directly compare the results.
    In general, I would assume crossfire on the x58 will scale similarly to the x38/48 as they both have the same PCIe configuration.
    Reply
  • Crashman
    outlw6669Thanks for finally getting this review out!
    It was planned for September but kept getting delayed due to tight deadlines on other articles. But when the economy finally went from a slow decline to a nosedive in November, we knew this article had to come out right away. More people are putting new systems on hold and looking for ways to keep their old ones up to current performance standards, and we care about upgraders just as much as system builders.
    Reply
  • arkadi
    Yeah I know, the comment was in general...
    Reply