Crossfire or Misfire?

Crossfire or Misfire

  • Crossfire

    Votes: 75 16.7%

  • Misfire

    Votes: 373 83.3%
  • Total voters
    448
Missfire for one reason, they had years to watch nvidia fail and triumph while nvidia brought SLI to the market, FIRST. After all that the expectations should be higher. Thats basic logic, u either come out to market first or you build a better one later. I will be buying a single 7800GTX because HL2: Lost Coast, and DoD:Source look great in HDR among many other reasons like the fact i can go right this second to newegg and order a card that will arrive in 2-3 days.

Let's see what happens with crossfire after x1800 series drops. Although i am not impressed i still wish good things for ati and crossfire as it will be extremely important in one thing that every person who voted misfire cares about: less $$ for nvidia "counterpart", whether it be 6800U or 7800GT, or GF3 Ti500..

edit: didnt know he was banned either...first pp deleted...

ps: what does QTF mean?
 
lithium726 said:
it can also mean quite fuckin true ;)
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Yeah but only when it has at least 1 ! after it.

QFT = Quoted for thruth
QFT! = Quite fuckin true

and if you add leet speak afterwards

QTF!! OMGZ j()0 @r3 STup|D = I am a fucking lame ass!
 
Majin said:
Yeah but only when it has at least 1 ! after it.

QFT = Quoted for thruth
QFT! = Quite fuckin true

and if you add leet speak afterwards

QTF!! OMGZ j()0 @r3 STup|D = I am a fucking lame ass!
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I see your :p :p and raise you one "QFT!" and a :cool:
 
heh thanks, in all my 'n00bness' i never saw QFT before. thanks for clearing that up.
 
Crossfire so far sucks because:

1600x1200 60hz limitation, and no, this doesn't only affect CRT. I have an LCD that has 1920x1200 res.

Crappy USB performance on mobo (both throughput and CPU utilization). I mean if ATI couldn't do a proper USB implementation (I mean come on USB has been around forever) why didn't they give it up and go with an external solution, like a NEC chip or something?

Crappy network performance (at least one of the dual ones) on mobo. Is this indicative of a problem with all the 1x PCI express slots? Or maybe PCI slots? Or both? Would really suck to put a nice HD digital TV tuner card in there and have it choke on bandwidth limitations. Or a nice RAID SATA/SCSI card.

No SATA 3gb. And with potential PCI/PCI express bandwidth limitations it may not be something that you can easily get from an addon card).

No RAID 5 (sure this a niche feature, but it would be nice to have anyway)

DDR 333 limitation on mobo if all 4 slots are populated, wtf? I thought that kinda issue was taken care of LONG ago on mobos. I mean ok I can understand if you restrict the brand/model of memory thats certified to run on this to get the high speed with all slots being used, but locking it down to 333?

You are required to buy new mobo and graphics card (I purchased an SLI mobo, and it would have been nice to have it compatible with that, its basically the standard now for dual graphics cards, and if this is the best ATI can do, it is not going to have any challanges any time soon). BTW, I just saw a claim that this limitation is 100% driver. I.e. you could theoretically use ATI in a SLI mobo were it not for driver restrictions. If this is true that is a sucky thing to do to your customers. I wonder if anyone has tried SLI in the ATI mobos? I wonder if nvidia has the same restriction?

The 3 head adapter cable is silly, all it does is limit the # of displays you can plug into the dual card solution. I'm not sure you can even do Dual Monitor displays on the cards? The reviews that have tried it seem to say it doesn't work, plugging into the extra ports on on the slave or the DVI on the master.

You have to have a stupid adapter card to plug into the 2nd pci express 16x slot if you dont have a 2nd graphics card. One that you are garunteed to lose once you put in 2 cards. At least most SLI mobos that have the card, have it reversable so its always in the mobo, its not going to get lost. And many of the newest ones dont even need a card at all. Didn't ATI claim they wouldn't need an adapter card at some point?

Oh and wtf is up with the order of the cards in the slots mattering? Lol, if you put the cards in wrong slots it wont work!!

It doesn't work with some (no one knows how many yet) CRT monitors. You wont get ANY output. Too bad if you have one of those, you are screwed. Guess you have to buy another monitor. Sure, ATI says its manufacture fault for not having complete EDID info communicated from the monitor, but I've never seen any other graphics card have this issue. And who the crap knows if thier monitor supports "extended EDID?" I dont recall that feature being on the specs list of any monitor I've looked at. Why not do something like default to some low res and let you manually adjust it later? Last I checked, if a memory module had incomplete SPD info, you could still use the memory in most cases and set the stuff manually.

Crossfire doesn't work with all games out of the box like they claimed. In a quite a number of cases you actually DECREASE game performance running two of them haahahahahhah. And they STILL need game specific profiles to enable any non-default dual mode that isn't slow and sucky, they didn't tell the whole truth about that either. Too bad they didn't give you control of the crossfire modes yourself in the driver panel. Looks like its default sucky mode, or game specific profile from ATI (can't add any of your own), or nothing.

Crossfire only works with D3D games supposedly. I've seen nothing factual about this one way or the other yet though. And yeah, OpenGL games are few and far between, but its still a negative point if true.

Performance isn't that great compared to other options that end up being cheaper.

Oh yeah and what about SM3 and HDR support? I just added Day of Defeat: Source to my game list and that thing looks GREAT with HDR. I didn't like the old DoD, but this one is a GREAT game so far.
I hear that ATI is supported for HDR for DoD S, but what about other games?

Oh and whats funny is a lot of web sites with reviews are claiming things directly from ATI's press release like how you can have mismatched cards while nvidia makes you have same brand, core and memory clock, bios, etc. Last I checked nvidia was fixing that in a driver release so you could have mixed bios versions, mixed clock speeds, mixed brands, etc etc.

Note: I'm talking about current crossfire for all this stuff. If x1800 comes out and beats the pants off of everything else and doesn't have these limitations, great! Unfortunately even if the next ATI graphics card does beat pants off everythign, there's still those motherboard suckage issues to consider.

Oh also, someone asked for links to buy the stuff. Good question, where are the links? Is this yet ANOTHER paper launch? I see a few sucky express 200 ATI mobos at newegg, but no crossfire master cards.
 
personally i think it's still too early to fully say success or failure. some people could say SLI was a failure. some people can say crossfire is great.
 
I think that had the original poster said "Crossfire as it stands today, crossfire or misfire," almost no one would have voted. The only people who admit to voting for crossfire have said its because they think that the x1800 will be great and fix everything.


Shifra said:
the A8N-Delux, has chipset fans burning out all over the place). Thats all SLI could do. Its craptasticness lasted a full 2 months before Nvidia fixed it. Thats goddamn pathetic for a retail launch dont you think?
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Yeah a sucky chipset fan is surely reason to dis the entire board.

Me, for reasons of quietness (since I had read it was kinda noisey) just threw a tall passive heatsink on it before I even powered it on.

{NG}Fidel said:
Because SLi Came out on Time and had no problems? Right Empty?
Jesus it seems like you guys safely erased SLis true history now that its been a year and solved its problems. The Reason I am so lenient on Cross Fire is because I realize now how this dual GPU Crap goes through a cycle of sorts. With SLi It took a year to fix the Widescreen and Dual Screen Issue along with Performance and game profile issues. THe Overclocking issues and more flexible GPU mixing Features are being includuded in either the next set of Drivers or the Current (not an SLi owning guy here so writing that from my head).
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Hmm yeah, and the 1600x1200 60hz limit is a driver issue then? Cause all the issues you mentioned above were driver fixes I believe.
Last time I checked the res limit was a hardware chip issue. I.e. you buy it and you are stuck with it. Not to mention all those other things I posted about above, many of them aren't driver issues.

BBA said:
Tom's hardware...yea.

Here is Toms hardware on 7800GTX:

To say I havent seen numbers this bad anywhere else would be an understatement.

It shows a single 7800GTX performing better than the crossfire (from the above post)
It also shows the 7800GTX SLI performing worse than the non-SLI in HL2.

Brings to question what drivers , what settings and who paid the check he is cashing...not to mention just a plain idiot doing the review.
Hate to say it but I think that bench is BS.
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I think its partly because of the resolutions they tested at. You can't seriously stress SLI or powerhouse cards like 7800 GTX until you get to 1600x1200 and beyond. And even then you have to crank up the AA.

It could also be that they tested weird driver revisions, or tested weird modes of SLI or who knows. But yeah, its odd that all other reviews show a much differant picture and toms shows nvidia 7800 getting drop kicked.
Its one of those results thats way out there, not where you'd expect it to be. Normally if you were doing statistics, you'd toss out a result like that, or just average all other results and let this weird one get averaged out since it would be outweighed by all the others. So yeah, I'd definatly take Tom's with a grain of salt. Read some of the 10 other reviews and compare them to toms if you are thinking about if its any good.

And it could be this:
BBA said:
Whats relevant is Toms compared the xfire results to an invalid SLI result taken from some earlier messed up review where Tom tried to make people believe the SLI was actually slower than the non-SLI.
In otherwords, Toms hardware is trickery biased to the company paying him to make them look better.
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Although I think its just that he probably didnt take the time to rerun the 7800 stuff, but just took them from the previous. I.e. that famous quote about never assigning something or other when it could be stupidity/incompetence.



tornadotsunamilife said:
Why does so many people compare the 7800GTX performance with X850XT's in Crossfire but not 6800U in SLi?
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Check anandtech, they compare them both.

magoo said:
SLI. You can have it now, it works,the pictures are beautiful, and no dongle to dangle. (unless you like playing with your dongle?????)
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hahahaahahahahahaha. LOL. nice one
 
Hmm yeah, and the 1600x1200 60hz limit is a driver issue then? Cause all the issues you mentioned above were driver fixes I believe.
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The Limitation is Hardware I understand that. Sorry about my post, I've been sick all week but 90% of what I said is still true (talking about SLi Problems).

I take X8x0 Series Cross Fire with a Grain of Salt for Two Reasons. Its Pathetic but understandable Resolution Limit and HZ Limit.
It was really just a knee jerk reaction to SLi that the Top Brass of ATi (Hard Ware Idiots) Wanted ASAP.

X8x0 Series Cross Fire is a waste of money no matter what you do. Unless you get it for free of course.
Still What I am looking at is how its performance Scales and it does quite well for its first apearance on the Dual GPU Stage.

Those are my Reasons for kind of pushing X8x0 Cross Fire to the side. Its pathetic in allot of ways but it shows promise. That Promise is only for the X1x00 Series though. That generation will have Engineers Thinking of Cross Fire Support from the Get Go.

I just wanted to point out that everything has its problems at launch ATi did a Amazing Job making a generation that was never intended to be used in a Dual GPU Config work but that doesnt make up for the fact that it sucks. I commend ATi but Im still Dissapointed by their End Result.
Another thing I think, The X850 Should be compared to both the 6x00 Series and the 7800 series. Both of those generations are competitors. The X8x0 Series competes with the 6800 Series based on when they were both released and performance wise and the X8x0 Series competes with the 7800 Due to its current position as ATis top card.
 
The performance seems to be there.... more so than SLI at first....and even with current SLI configurations, the performance increase from single to dual in ATI hardware is greater than on nVidia hardware... All they need to do is fix all the "small" issues.
 
Misfire. Whats with the configuration? Looks sloppy. Last ditch effort to come out with something innovative, just like Intel with their dual cores. What happened in the red corner?
 
I'm relatively new here and some posts by certain people just scare me. Why are people defending ATI or Nvidia like they are a country of origin or some sort of ethical morally right/wrong decision?

Calm down geez.

I remember seeing an article where ATI was second to Intel in marketshare for graphics so the ATI people feel safe Nvidia was quite lower.

I personally prefer Nvidia to ATI from experience not from reviews. Drivers and games have always worked for me on the cards. I had a GF2 then had two GF4 Ti 4600's till I recently got a 6600GT which isn't bad. ATI what half my friends that actually game alot in WoW HL2 BF2 and whatnot have always had driver issues hell they had driver issues with DAoC and plenty of others which always kept me from switching. I have never ever once had a driver issue with Nvidia on any game I played and they are mainly mainstream games only. My experience anyways I am sure someone had some problems.

Looking for a top of the line rig today to replace my so old and crappy AGP based system (Yea right where is the 7800gtx agp bastages?) which works fine BTW :p. Dell offers dual 7800gtxs and now has the 7800go. Dell? WTF? Every website says NF4 plus SLI just rocks and looking at the sheer amount of options on the NF4 boards I am impressed. Oh and I prefer Asus as well. I don't really overclock anymore since the first celerons no point really for me anyways don't care stable is what I want. I mean hell I can buy a freakin dell SLI that tells average consumers and myself something and that's SLI is stable and works. I really want to buy two 7800GTX's and will probaly do so since ATI has nothing close to this. ATI isn't going away like 3DFX did and neither is Nvidia but this competition between is great for me and everyone else. We all benefit doesn't matter which brand you like because in the end the superior product at reasonable price wins.

Crossfire intrigued me and I read up on it and it looks like it's kind of a failure at this point in time. Nvidia just has the market penetration if they are hooked into Dell and other OEM system builders which matters most at this point. ATI should have released a superior product which they haven't. The product is late to market and was promised sooner. The product does not meet performance and various other expectations of the end user period. Convoluted schemes in order to use the product are it's downfall as well. SLI you pop two cards identical to each other in and change a driver setting? That's easy. I did read about them letting you use multi vendor bios and oc'ed cards which is the right direction for Nvidia and sooner the better. I feel more confident that a 7800gtx sli setup now for me will last me 2-4 years gaming compared to crossfire. Drivers will be there and the platform won't be unstable.

Crossfire I can't really buy into this as it's probaly unheard of to get this equipment through normal means on the internet. Nvidia is and has been clearly the best choice for a long time now. 6 and 7 series that is in my opinion and probaly most of the general public.

I see alot of people saying wait for the ATI card it will blow the nvidia card away or the combo card mobo will but honestly come on people 7800gtx has been here kicking ass and taking names while this card isn't even known to exist? The new ATI card better be twice as fast as the 7800gtx because if it isn't it's a failure. What's the point of releasing a card so much later than a a competitor when it's only 10fps slower or even 10fps faster in a game? No point really in picking up something untried and buggy :). I really hoped or thought rather crossfire would be better than NF4 but it doesn't look that way when you consider time to market stability drivers and features.

What matters is having your product out there at the right time and ATI missed the right time for too long. ATI needs another year or two to comeback with something probaly then maybe I will choose ATI if they are better price perfmorance wise.

I don't see how you can compare 6800 or 7800 to the new ATI card though since it's been soooooooooo loooooooooooooong.

ATI dropped the ball it happens nvidia did during the 5 series i mean come on what were they thinking?
 
The motherboard limitation on SLI-CFire is purely DRIVER related, ie: they hard coded "ME WORKIE ONLY ON MY MB CHIPSET....cause I'm a DICKIE". Not a customer friendly action.... for either ATI or NVidia.

All that is needed is (2) x8 PCIe channels in physical x16 connectors. That's it, no other provision or capability is required by the MB to have it work.

ATI seriously dropped the ball in that they could have built the CFire totally external, simply 2 DVI-D connections as input, and a DVI-I output connector. Maybe a USB2.0 port for driver control of the external device, though embedding control info in the DVI stream probably eliminates the need.

Couple that with coding the drivers to work on ANY SLI/CFire capable motherboard and THEN it might have stood a chance. The poll results should send a chill down ATI's spine, the opera didnt work, the fatlady died of a heart attack long before the 3rd act.

Myself and noone I know would remotely consider buying a CFire motherboard unless it was SIGNIFICANTLY superior to our current DFI NF4 boards. What's the point of DE-tuning the rest of the system to use some particular video setup? And the selection I've seen so far, the OEM's CFire motherboards are frankly LOUSY. All on a par with ECS's NF4 for "overclocking" support and overall thoroughness of features/design.

It's PATHETIC, I dont even have all the datasheets and _I_ with my 15yr old PC design software can design a better MB then any of the OEM's have presented us with.

+++++

Further, the MASTER DVI(i/o) connector has HUGE possibilities for HTPC use. Imagine being able to plug your Cable/Tivo/Sat settopbox into the DVI input of the master card, and driver SW for your mediacenter PC being able to then do all sorts of MAGIC, and the DVI output of the HTPC then drives your HDTV.

There are no PCI PCIe etc cards out there with DVI "INPUT" to use as a means to allow the latest HDTV Tivo type boxes to work well with a HTPC setup. This CFire MASTER card could be the HTPC card of choice if the driver SW can "WDM" the DVI input as input from a settop box.

The shit that these people DONT think of, boggles the mind. No wonder nothing gets done in NAmerica anymore.

Not to mention re-iterating the potential stock manipulation activities going in, I've sent a letter to the SEC to ask them to look into it, as an ATI stockholder.
 
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