Unfortunately my experience with CrossfireX in combo with 2x Radeon 3870 X2 have turned out to be not very pleasant; and if they will do it, I'm really not sure as to why ATI would release this driver to the public. In short, if you had short-term plans buying two Radeon 3870 X2 cards to setup in CrossfireX, I'd wait. What I've just seen is unbelievably rough. Perhaps a better driver update will come soon, or we received a too beta here. This however is a driver officialy distributed to the press yesterday, pending the official release.

It took 25 minutes for the Catalyst drivers to install. The first installation completey froze up. The second time it worked though, driver reports back build 8.3 CrossfireX reported back nicely and it indeed is now enabled.

The first thing one does; 3DMark06, stutters and shows ill behaviour .. returned results where ~ 13000 points.

• Call of Duty 4, 2560x1600 completely crashes. Other resolutions show performance less than a GeForce 9600 GT in SLI mode.
• Quake Wars ET- crashes or garbled rendering
• World in Conflict, works good, close to 8800 GTX performance.
• Ghost recon 2, shows performance close to 8800 GTX SLI
• WarFront - Reasonable perfoamnce, yet below 9600 GT SLI
• Stalker - crashed
• Frontlines: Fuel of War - crashed
• Crysis (Medium IQ) - crashes
• FEAR, runs nice. Close to 8800 GTX SLI performance.

I sincerely hope for AMD-ATI that this is isolated to our setup only or just to this driver (Intel X38 mobo, DDR3, Core 2 Extreme 6800, Vista 32-bit). But this is what we get. Where CrossfireX does work, it does an okay job though and shows potential. A lot of work is to be done for the driver team though. I'll update this news-post some more today with more games and have added the more stable test results towards our VGA charts.

Please bare in mind I consider the results to be rough and based on a driver that seems to need a lot of work, therefore the results included are preliminary at best.