ATI's new Radeon X1900 CrossFire solution is the most exciting CrossFire platform we've seen yet. Performance scaled particularly well in Call of Duty 2 at 1600x1200, as well as Half-Life 2 Lost Coast with HDR at 2048x1535, where performance was up by a factor of 1.5. We have a strong feeling that the numbers will only go up with a faster CPU, as a card as powerful as the Radeon X1900 XTX finds itself CPU-bound in a lot of cases all by itself, let alone once you combine two cards together to run in CrossFire mode.

But this is where ATI's Super AA mode kicks in. In cases where you're being held back by the speed of your processor, simply turn on Super AA to experience nearly jaggie-free visuals. As you saw in the benchmarks, ATI's 8x Super AA mode comes with a very minimal performance hit at lower resolutions, and even delivers playable performance at resolutions as high as 1600x1200 in Half-Life 2 Lost Coast. Even ATI's 14x AA mode performs well. NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 graphics cards don't scale nearly as well at the higher AA modes. NVIDIA's 8xAA mode delivers very fluid performance at lower resolutions, but by 1600x1200 the SLI cards are tapped out. Even the mighty GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB, with its super high-end 850MHz GDDR3 memory doesn't have the bandwidth to game adequately at these resolutions with 8xAA, while the 16x mode runs like a slideshow at hi-res.

The compatibility question is stil up in the air. You saw how Radeon X1900 CrossFire performed with IL-2. Considering how new the platform is, we wouldn't be surprised if this were the case for a lot of obscure titles. The problem is that ATI's only had enough time to build in CrossFire support for a limited number of games, the rest haven't been optimized yet. NVIDIA provides built-in tools in their driver that allows SLI card owners to add SLI support to games that haven't been optimized by NVIDIA directly for SLI. Unfortunately at this time, ATI doesn't provide this for CrossFire owners -- either it works or it doesn't. This is a limitation of CrossFire that ATI needs to address quickly, as many gamers will not want to wait for a driver that may or may not come to add CrossFire to their favorite games. As one of the readers in our comments put it "With crossfire all you can do is turn it on or off, nothing more. You can sit and pray that the game runs faster, and if it doesn´t, live with it and wait for the next driver..."