CrossFire and SLI usually means two identical graphics circuits working together for optimal performance, and we can imagine it’s a lot easier to build drivers which focuses on support for identical chips. When ATI decided to release its Catalyst 8.1 driver, it had included a CrossFire mode where the user could use two different cards, namely Radeon HD 3870 and Radeon HD 3850, in CrossFire (although both based on the RV670 core). NVIDIA has no such solution as of today, and over at Fudzilla they’ve done some quick tests with a mix of CrossFire setups, which reveal a quite impressive performance scaling.
Half-Life 2 scaled up to 50%. Even if the overall gains weren’t as impressive, you can overclock the two cards separately.
In this test we can see that ATI has done a great job, but it’s really up to you to consider if this interesting feature of mixing affordable HD3850 with HD3870s is really worth it. This new capability might also be very interesting when upgrading your rig.
We’re really looking forward to what ATI will bring in the future as it is entirely focused on CrossFireX and multi-GPU. This includes the coming RV770 chip, which by itself may not be fastest card around, but when you start adding cores and cards …
