9600GT, CrossfireX arrive

WE HAVE JESTED before when we talked about a “graphics bonanza”, but we think yesterday beats them all. Two distinct yet similarly flavoured events took place. At the head of the pack we have Nvidia’s 9600GT series – the next-gen (albeit, not really next-gen) numeral sequence in the Geforce marchitecture hit the web with the impact of a freight train. Thirty reviews litter the cyberether, but we can’t count above 30 so you’ll have to take this with a grain of salt.

The 9600GT is shaping up to be a particularly nasty counter from Nvidia, as its price point is just below(ish) the $200 mark and performance is just shy of an HD3870. DAAMIT is expected to parry-riposte with a generalized lowering of prices on their 3800 cards (we wonder which price bracket that will nudge the 3400 and 3600 series into). However we do think 9600’s biggest rival comes from within the Nvidia fold, in the form of the 8800GT.

Here are the reviooze, all *coff* thirty *coff* of them:

Anandtech

Ars Technica

Bit-Tech

Chile Hardware

Computer Shopper

Elite Bastards

Extremetech

Firi ng Squad

Fudzilla

Guru 3D

HardOCP

Hardspell

Hardware Zone

Hexus

Hot Hardware

I4U

Legion Hardware

Legit Reviews

Neoseeker

NV News

OCC

Overclock 3D

PC Perspective

PC Pro

Revioo

T-Break

Tech Power Up

Tom’s Hardware

TweakTown

VR Zone

In a defiant Duke Nukem “Come get some” attitude, DAAMIT unleashed its long-awaited CrossfireX drivers enabling Tri & Quad Crossfire. Actually, it’s been unleashed for some time now, but to avoid weird NDA rants from journos, the current (beta) version of the CrossfireX driver was prereviewed under very tight AMD security, with hog-tied hacks and no benchmarks à la carte.

Although performance is shaping up quite reasonably for tri- and quad- Crossfire configuration at this stage, most tests show that GPU scaling above 2-3 GPUs is pretty useless save for one single benchie: CoD4. But considering this is still pretty early on in the driver development department, there’s still a few more Frames to eke out of the cards.

The previews – in general – were performed in preset conditions created by AMD, ie: a Spider platform and pre-selected benchmarks (CoD4, Bioshock, UT3, Crysis and HL2: Episode Two). Yes, AMD have actually taken a page from the abridged Intel PR Handbook: Pentium 4 edition – look at the pretty platform/ignore the CPU; sleight of hand thingie.

Being the preview that it is, we recommend a huge grain of salt followed by mouthwash. Unrestricted reviews are coming soon, AMD’s chosen ones promise. We can only imagine what kind of perverted ideas reviewers are coming up with to test the Tri and Quad Crossfire. If they happen to bench them on… let’s say… an Intel platform the universe will collapse on itself from irony (thanks Char lie!).

Here they are:

Anandtech

Hexus

PC Games Hardware (English hier) µ