Put two HD 4850s together in CrossFire and you might expect great things but the results are even more miserable than they are with the Asus HD 3850 X2, which is two 3850s hardwired together in CrossFire. It’s a strange sight to behold but on our test system SLI and CrossFire graphics limp along and yield none of the benefits that we see in synthetic benchmarks such as 3DMark Vantage and PC Mark Vantage.
3DMark Vantage Results
Performance Mode
Longer bars are better
COMMENTS
EPIC FAIL!
What were you thinking when you made those graphs?
They tell you nothing, NOTHING I tell you!
And another thing...
Can't understand folks' bleating about the PowerPlay thing. There are so many folk giving it "ooh once again ATi screws us with the drivers, this is a joke, I'm sticking with nVidia at least the drivers work"
1) nVidia are just as bad if not worse for feature support in early drivers - look at the 7800GX2 fiasco.
2) If you want to spend more money on a card that will do the same job and consume more power then go ahead and quit whining
3) Er, wait a few weeks?
The only way I can see the "ZOMG the drivurz are skrewd and now I have to w8 a hole month" argument making any sense is if you're a spoilt kid buying into the latest architecture every time. Even then they don't come out often enough to make much sense out of such pissy bitchy whining.
PS: I'm not an ATi fanboy (until a few weeks ago I was poised to buy a 9800GTX) but I am a big fan of not having to filter out pissy whiny moans whilst reading comments on a mature IT news site.
Crysis?
Come on guys, everyone knows that Crysis is not an accurate Benchmark. It has been dropped from tests on a number of occasions.
Im waiting for anyone to do a fanless 4850 for xFire
@Pointless
Wow... a PS3 fanboi, hey?
/golfclap
I'm not even going to go into it, since so many people already did. I'd just be beating a dead ... vulture?
Regarding Crossfire
There is one situation, and one situation only, where Crossfire/SLI come into their own. Big displays. Really big displays. I'm running at 3840x1024, with two 7900GTXs (I'll upgrade before too long). In an ordinary machine, the difference between one card and two isn't worth the money. However, on a really big screen, having 1GB of memory instead of 512MB means something, and HL2: Episode 2 will run at full res on this machine, no worries. It sure as hell wouldn't with just the one card!
I would love to buy a 4870HD (or, as is far more likely, two), but this motherboard is all nVidia chipsets, so I'd need a new system core first.
