There is a lot of talk about the new
Radeon HD 4770 these days, many are wondering if they
should go Crossfire, most of them probably for the
first time. These new card are the first of many
forthcoming GPUs build on the 40nm platform. What this
means is lower power consumption, less heat, cheaper
production costs making it a better value for us.
Below are my experinces with Crossfire on this PC
system, specifically to see the scaling abilities of
the secondary 4770 card in action.
Column Diagram of Secondary Card Usage (27 July,
2009)
This time we have 10 games thrown to the test using Catalyst 9.6, including new pc
releases and a game benchmark. Of the games here, Dead Space, StreetFighter IV, Trials 2 SE offers
100% usage with Overlord 2 and Ghostbusters coming in very near, making 50% of the games here basically maxing out
a Crossfire setup, not bad at all. We even see a small game company like RedLynx with their Trials 2 SE pushing a CF setup like nothing.
Today we look at 40% of the games tested ran at over 60%
usage, which is almost double of that we saw in the first test! Anno 1404 comes in at 85%
which is a great score, followed by COH - Tales of Valor
at 80%, Empire Total War at 70%, and end of the line, The Void at 69%.
At last place we see Alien Shooter 2 Reloaded, a DirectX 8.1 game released in 2009.
It's actually a remix of the early 2007 game of the same name by small time developer SIGMA.
You cant really blame them for the poor crossfire support since the game runs fine on
average systems to begin with.
Edit 2: My preorder of Anno 1404 came in last day. I have been playing for awhile but to my
surprice, CF was not being used...now it does again. I guess restarting the game fixed it.
Column Diagram of Secondary Card Usage (24 May,
2009)
Of the 12 games that have been tested in v1.0, we
can see that 50% of the games are being maxed out at
100% on our Crossfire setup, thats great! and good news
for all the Crysis and FarCry
2 gamers who wants a boost!
About 25% of the tested games ran at or over 60%
usage. Demogod did well with 80% but
interesting enough GTA4, a big title
that has given headaches to some gamers due to it's
high system requirements, ended up using only 60% of
our crossfire setup. The game simple seems to scale
better going from a Core 2 Duo setup to a Quad Core (or
Tri Core) one.
The newest game in our test, Killing
Floor, a worthy addition to most Left4Dead
players, scales only to 35% and gets the honor of last
place in our tests. I found this a bit weird so I did
some research. It turns out that the game is build on
the older Unreal 2.5 engine (2004) which is an update
of Unreal 2.0 engine (2002). That pretty much explains
the weak Crossfire scaling we see.
There is a lot of talk about the new
Radeon HD 4770 these days, many are wondering if they
should go Crossfire, most of them probably for the
first time. These new card are the first of many
forthcoming GPUs build on the 40nm platform. What this
means is lower power consumption, less heat, cheaper
production costs making it a better value for us.
