CrossFire on P965-Boards

Zitat

Our experience to date with CrossFire capability on the ASUS P5B Deluxe board has been surprising to us. We expected a lot less performance along with a lot more issues. We are in the middle of doing compatibility testing on over three dozen games at this time and so far the vast majority have worked flawlessly. While not having OpenGL compatibility is disappointing, we can understand why ATI has chosen to remove this feature until they can guarantee performance and stability in OGL games. We are more concerned about the lack of HDR CrossFire capability in an older title like Half Life 2; hopefully this can be corrected quickly, or it might be a system/motherboard specific issue. We are still testing this title along with Episode One and should have a resolution shortly. In regards to the Company of Heroes issue, until we hear back from ATI it will be difficult to determine if it is a driver or game issue. It was not until the 1.02 patch that SLI worked properly with the game so we will give ATI the benefit of doubt at this time, even though CrossFire worked perfectly on the 975X based ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe board.

Overall, a three to nine percent performance hit in our limited testing is not that bad, although the more performance minded enthusiasts will likely consider the 975X boards for CrossFire performance. However, with the recent price reductions on the Asus P5-B Deluxe this board becomes an attractive alternative. We believe ASUS has done a remarkable job in such a short period of time in getting a CrossFire capable BIOS ready for the P5B Deluxe. We have to give extra credit to ASUS as within a couple of days after the initial bios release they were able to enhance performance and implement a CrossFire auto-sensing function to enable DMI optimizations. These optimizations directly led to performance improvements of up to 9% in most of our game titles compared to the previous bios. Hopefully, they will have optimizations ready for CrossFire solutions other than the X1900 and X1950 shortly. We still have a significant amount of testing to complete but at this time it appears ATI CrossFire works as advertised on the P965 platform and maybe just that much better on the ASUS P5B Deluxe.