4870 & 4850 crossfire-x analysis

Crossfire has come a long way in the past few years, the days where a dongle needed to be plugged into both cards via the DVI ports are well behind us, and on some of ATI's lower end cards a software Crossfire solution is used which doesn't even require you to install ribbons connecting the cards. This review wasn't done for the sake of being done, it is for people considering adding that extra card to their system, to see if the money spen is justified.

 

These benchmarks have shown that ATI has fixed it's anti-aliasing issues which the HD2000 and HD3000 series suffered badly from. I was surprised to find that the higher I cranked the resolution and AA, the performance hit taken was minimal. Yes in some cases the framerates could be considered unplayable, but it shows just what these cards are capable of. I have to say I expected the performance increase to be somewhat higher, bu you have to take into consideration that all 4 games are optimized for nVidia cards (save for GTA IV, which will be posted after the official patch is released). No whether buying a second card for crossfire is worth it, I'll let you be the judge. We all seem to have different views on what playable framerates are and whether spending an incredible amount of money on a second, third, or even fourth video card for 5 - 10 more FPS is worth it. So, having done all this, I let you be the judge.