Now that AMD has released the Catalyst 8.3 drivers, CrossFireX is finally out in the wild. This means that you will be free to combine any cards of the Radeon HD 3800 series; 3850, 3870 and 3870X2, mix and match any way you want. If you want to run three or four cards doesn’t matter, but it’s only available in Windows Vista. This version also introduces Hybrid CrossFire, which delivers a great improvement for people running AMD 780-based platforms with Radeon HD 3400 series cards.
Catalyst 8.3 also brings;
- Anti-aliasing support for the Unreal Tournament 3.0 engine
- Hydravision – HydraGrid, Hydravision Hotkeys, HydraVision Virtual desktops and HydraVision Wizard
- Digital Panel GPU image scaling – enable GPU accelerated scaling for Wide aspect LCD displays
- Edge enhancement, which adjusts the level of sharpness of video content
- De-noise, which removes ghosting artifacts while preserving details of the original video
- Tessellation support
- Call of Juarez: Up to 20% improvement is noticed on ATI CrossFireX™ configured systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD38x0 series of product
- Company of Heroes DX10: Up to 17% improvement is noticed, especially at lower resolutions, on ATI Radeon™ HD38x0 products
- Crysis DX10: Up to 15% improvement is noticed on all supported ATI Radeon™ products
- Lost Planet DX9: Up to 36% improvement is noticed across all supported ATI Radeon™ products and in ATI CrossFireX™ configured systems
- Shadermark 2.1: Performance scores increased up to 35% across all supported Radeon™ products and in ATI CrossFireX™ configured systems
- Unreal Tournament 2004: Up to 10% increase in performance is noticed on systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD2400, HD2600, or HD3400 series of products on in ATI CrossFireX™ configured systems
- Resolved tons of issues with games in Windows Vista and Windows XP.
The biggest news is the CrossFireX support though, and there have been several reviews posted around the web. However, we haven’t found a single one that uses both Catalyst 8.3 and a system that is not limited by the CPU. We have cards in the lab and a system which will be running at more than 3.0GHz…
Until then you can check out the reviews we’ve found so far;
:: FiringSquad :: HardOCP :: LegitReviews :: TweakTown ::
