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Before we begin, please remember this. There's a tactical disadvantage for our Crossfire test. A while ago I chose the ASUS P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe in combo with a Core 2 Duo processor to be our test platform of choice (NVIDIA) for graphics cards. All cards today are tested on that platform EXCEPT the cards in Crossfire which had to be tested on a Crossfire compatible mainboard.

Now the mainboards performance wise do not differ that much, yet the processor does matter a lot. The ASUS P5N32-SLI SE is armed with the mighty Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 and the Crossfire ASUS A8N32-MVP Deluxe mainboard is based on AMD. So I placed one of the fastest socket 939 CPU's I had available in there (Athlon FX-57), equipped it with water-cooling and overclocked it towards 3 GHz to be able to compete with the Conroe E6700 a tad better.

But not matter what we do, in 10x7 and 12x10 the Crossfire scores will be a tad lower then they should have been due to the fact I did not have Conroe compatible Crossfire mainboard at hand. But the FX overclocked to 3 GHz manages to do pretty well though.

Let the games commence.

Serious Sam 2

March 2001, developer Croteam released the original Serious Sam for the PC and pretty much made other standard first person shooters look like they were in neutral. The game, along with its stand alone follow up The Second Encounter, had an impressive graphics engine, huge outdoor environments, some wacky weapons, a fun co-op mode, and most importantly some of the numerous and strangest enemies in FPS history. When players first saw the headless bomb filled suicide attacker charging at them full blast with a blood curdling scream, they knew that this game was something special.

Four and a half years later, Croteam's turn return to the plate with Serious Sam 2 and while it's basic gameplay hasn't changed it has enough new features to make it a fun and solid follow up to the original. The graphics are also greatly improved. Like the first, there is a story in Serious Sam 2 (there are even some extended cut scenes that pull the story forward) but you can pretty much ignore this aspect. It's all about "Serious" Sam Stone going from point A to point B and blowing up everything that gets in his way.

Constantly flaunting a huge draw distance, extensive foliage, many impressive lighting effects such as refraction and even HDR, plus more than solid framerates, the Serious Engine 2 looks like a real beast.

What are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously we tend to think that all games should be played at the best image quality (IQ) possible. There's a dilemma though, IQ often interferes with the performance of a graphics card. We measure this in FPS, the number of frames a graphics card can render per second, the higher it is the more fluently your game will display itself. 

A game's frames per second (FPS) is a measured average of a series of tests. That test often is a timedemo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game(play). After forcing the same image quality settings this timedemo is then used for all graphics cards so that the actual measuring is as objective as can be.

If a card can only manage less than 30 FPS then the game is barely playable.

With 30 FPS up-to roughly 40 FPS you'll be very able to play the game with perhaps a tiny stutter at certain graphically intensive parts.

When a graphics card is doing 60 FPS on average or higher then you can rest assured that the game will likely play extremely smoothly at every point in the game.

You are always aiming for the highest possible FPS, versus the highest resolution, versus the highest image quality.

In orange we see the single X1650 XT. Now compare that with the X1650 Pro would you ? Cool stuff for sure. The card is actually closing in on a GeForce 7900 GS.

In red we can see the X1950 Pro, amazing performance for an amazing price. Let's fire off Crossfire.

Serious Sam 2 - 16xAF with HDR enabled Crossfire

In the above chart you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled. This actually is my preferred personal IQ setting for pretty much all games. And yes, you can play up-to 2560x1600 with the X1650 XT in Crossfire. Also have a look at the X1950 pro go.

For the 1950 Pro at 10x7 you see the single card performing better than two in Crossfire. Two reasons for that. First, the CPU discrepancy as described above and secondly, two cards require more CPU cycles.