DAAMIT seeds ninja 2900 rig

DAAMIT APPEARS to have come up with some special sauce somewhere in its secret underground lair - the kind of sauce that allows a 2900 XT Crossfire rig to beat the living daylights out of an 8800 GTX rig, something most would have previously thought impossible.

But, according to the chaps at PC Magazine, home to America's favourite crank, the new Falcon Northwest Mach V system, equipped with a pair of 1GB 2900 XTs, does over a comparable Nvidia system with some room to spare.

Looking closely at the benchmarks, however, does suggest a reason for the massive discrepancy - the 2900s almost triple the performance of the 8800 system at 2560x1600 in Company of Heroes, with PC Mag bods quoting 84 FPS for the 2900s and 32 FPS for the SLI rig. Our suggestion - Nvidia's drivers still suck when it comes to SLI and Vista, and it could be that DAAMIT has finally gotten its act together on that front.

It's not necessarily that the hardware is three times as fast - although someone with more hardcore creds than PC Mag is welcome to offer their thoughts on that - but more that setting up Vista SLI with an 8800 properly for a specific game title is the devil's own work and is more than likely to result in a duff setting somewhere that kills off performance.

Either way, the picture isn't good for the boys in green - the continuing poor performance and release schedule of Green Team drivers in Vista is now really starting to hurt. µ