ATI X1800 CrossFire Video Card Review

How does it work?

ATI?s Crossfire speeds gaming with ?supertiling, AFR? high-performance GPU sharing that evenly divides the processing and graphics rendering workload.

How Supertiling Works:

Think of your screen image divided into subsections like a checkerboard, with alternating black and white ?tiles.? Crossfire?s Supertiling intelligently alternates rendering duties of these tiles to each Radeon GPU for consistent, efficient load balancing with hassle-free compatibility.

Crossfire?s options also include a multiple load-sharing ?scissor? mode and an alternate frame-rate mode.

Another feature of Crossfire is the ?Super AA? modes. Once Crossfire is up and running you have the option to really turn up the Anti-Aliasing modes, going from the standard 2x,4x,6x all the way to 14x. Combining this with the High Quality Anisotropic option on the X1000 series ensures that you will see what the game developers had in mind when they created the games you are playing.

Setting it up:

So you?ve got your X1800XL/XT your new Crossfire card, and a Crossfire supported motherboard, let?s get it all set up.

In the first PCI-E slot (closest to the CPU) you?ll insert the standard card, and in the second slot you?ll plug in the Crossfire card. Now you’ll need to up the Crossfire dongle, notice that it will only attach to the master card one way, connect the other end of the dongle to the standard card and we are almost ready.

You?ll need to go into the BIOS and enable dual video card support. Once you?ve done that we?re off to Windows. Once Windows has finished detecting the new cards and arrangement you?ll likely need to restart, and then go into Catalyst Control Center.

Once there you simply click on Crossfire and then enable it. At this point you?re up and running if both of your cards are 512MB and if not then you?ll be forced to reboot once more to disable half of the Crossfire card memory. Now that we?re all set up let?s put it to use?