| Crossfire
- the first Vista implementation:
This
is the first driver release from ATI which features
Crossfire support, however ATI are keen to press
that opengl for Crossfire is coming in a later revision
as well as Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) enabled
by default for ALL applications. The Opengl is in
this initial release is supported in single card
mode and it is ATI's intention to simply deliver
a stable driver with emphasis on performance increases
as further revisions are released.
The
driver install takes slightly longer to complete
than the XP counterpart, and after one minute of
waiting upon a system reboot I was pleased to see
that Crossfire enabled without any issue. Unlike
single card mode, the initial load of CCC took around
20 seconds however once loaded browsing through
the CCC was instantaneous. Toggling CF on and off
causes the desktop to go black for apparently random
lengths of time, ranging from 20 seconds to a full
minute. We deliberately tried it under every situation,
toggling it on and off during normal windows use
to see how it would respond. Disabling Crossfire
always gives a faster response within the panel.
We did however experience a BSOD giving a "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGE_AREA".
Again I wouldnt call this a major bug, as it has
only happened once over several days of stress testing.
We also found that the CCC stopped responding once
causing us to reboot the test machine.
Opengl
in Crossfire?
As
I already mentioned above, Opengl with Crossfire
is not yet supported - ATI have clearly stated this,
however we wouldn't be Driver Heaven if we didn't
test this out. so we fired up Serious Sam 2, which
wouldnt even run. UT2004 was the same. We had to
try !
UT2004
Build UT2004_Build_[2005-11-23_16.22]
OS:
Windows NT 6.0 (Build: 6000)
CPU: AuthenticAMD Unknown processor @ 2207 MHz with
2046MB RAM
Video: GDI Generic
Either
GL_EXT_bgra or glDrawRangeElements not supported-
bailing out.
History:
UOpenGLRenderDevice::SetRes <- UWindowsViewport::TryRenderDevice
<- UWindowsViewport::OpenWindow <- UGameEngine::Init
<- InitEngine <- FMallocWindows::Free
Problems
with Vista Crossfire?
With our specific setup we ran into some
rather weird and unusual issues throughout the course
of our testing with Crossfire. I will address some
of these.
UT2004
D3D
In single card mode UT2004 ran without
a hitch, running with the ingame sliders to full
a solid 100-150fps were seen and even under the
most intense firefights the FPS dropped no lower
than 75fps. In theory we should be seeing almost
double the frame rate in Crossfire mode. Unfortunately
this was not the case, the framerate dropped to
around 50fps and this was with the CCC in default
setting mode. Enabling 8xFSAA caused the game to
go into a funky wire frame mode.
As
well as this, random sections of the screen would
shimmer black on occasion, and while this happened,
the frame rate would drop even lower. Trying 14FSAA
was bizarrely the only way to get UT2004 remotely
playable using Crossfire averaging 30 frames per
second. UT2004 and crossfire under vista using D3D
really seemed like a lost cause.
Half
Life 2: Lost Coast
This game would randomly lock up when changing
the AA settings. The game would also randomly crash.
This didn't occur in single card mode. We also ran
into similar issues with Dark Messiah under Crossfire.
Unfortunately
we only received this ATI driver several days before
the public release and while it is important we
presented our readers with even basic analysis of
the driver (which you should all be able to download
by the time you are reading this) ... we have not
had time to do as much testing with Crossfire as
we would like, especially as we haven't even had
time to report to ATI directly. With all this in
mind, we will not be publishing Crossfire performance
figures within this article, we simply ran out of
time and have had too many problems to feel it is
of any merit to our readers. To verify, we will
be building another test rig this week to see if
we have any better luck with Crossfire.
Single
Card Performance figures
XP:
The test system was built from scratch, a format
of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then
Windows XP was installed (SP2). Following the completion
of the installation, the ATI drivers were installed.
All updates were applied, including .NET Framework
3.0 (latest service pack) and the latest Media Player
version and Patches. Next, the latest builds of
the benchmarking tools were installed and finally,
the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test,
the ATI drivers were set to default quality/optimizations
(unless otherwise stated).
VISTA:
The test system was built from scratch, a format
of the hard drive was performed and then Vista was
installed. Following the completion of the installation,
the ATI drivers were installed. All updates were
applied also. Next, the latest builds of the benchmarking
tools were installed and finally, the hard drive
was de-fragmented. For each test, the ATI drivers
were set to default quality/optimizations (unless
otherwise stated).
Good
Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times
and the median result for each resolution/setting
is shown in the tables that will follow. All applications
had their latest patches applied and all hardware
features the latest BIOS/Firmware. |
