ATI HD4850 Crossfire vs Geforce GTX 280

It is the extremely high resolutions of 2048x1536 and 2560x1600 pixels that are the most interesting but ATI has nothing exciting to offer here at the moment. In many tests the Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire tandem lacks graphics memory. Although the two cards have a total of 1 gigabyte of local memory, applications can only use half that amount (which is the case for every modern homogeneous multi-GPU solution if the cards have the same amount of memory). As a result, ATI’s subsystem wins only in TES IV: Oblivion and equals its opponent in Battlefield 2142, HL2: Episode 2 and CoH: Opposing Fronts. On the other hand, the Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire delivers a playable frame rate in every of these games, except for CoH: Opposing Fronts, and also in C _©C: Kane’s Wrath So we are looking forward to benchmark the Radeon HD 4850 X2 that may be faster due to a larger amount of graphics memory and improved drivers.

The GeForce GTX 260 is not meant for such high display resolution, but the comparison is interesting anyway. Here, each solution wins five tests. They equal each other in five more tests. So, this is a draw overall.