XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI Versus ATI CrossFireX

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary, is the eighth release of the Tomb Raider series. It is a remake of the original Tomb Raider game from 1996 and includes all of the original ‘worlds’ from Tomb Raider. Created with an advanced version of the engine used for Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend, the gameplay mechanics, artificial intelligence and level puzzles of Tomb Raider: Anniversary are now more refined, in-depth and complex. The PC version of this title was released in North American on June 5, 2007.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary has a setting for full screen Anti-Aliasing that allows NVIDIA cards to run 16xQ AA and ATI cards to run at 4x AA. The highest Anti-Aliasing settings were used on both sets of cards at 1920×1200 to see how Quad GPUs do on this game title that actually comes bundled with many of the GeForce 9 series cards.

Results: The XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 does very well in this game with 16xQ AA enabled and showed nearly 100% scaling. The framerates in this game often were in the 400’s since much of it takes place in tunnels and tight areas. The benchmark was done using FRAPS in the toughest part of the game we could find. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 was 40% slower versus just one XFX GeForce 9800 GX2, but things got worse when a second card was used for CrossFireX testing. It seems there is a driver issue with Tomb Raider: Anniversary and performance actually dropped!