IvanV

Congratulations to Veridian3, DH and ATI for this great review, and all the effort put in making it, fixing the drivers and bringing this card to us.

The performance is really what it should be in most cases, and the work ATI has done in fixing the driver so far makes me confident that the performance issues, where they still exist, will be fixed. The only real problem is the frame rate dropping when the frame buffer is updated. While having a stutter or two per level may be bearable and preferable where X2 otherwise offers higher average fps and smoother experience, I'm afraid that by looking at the charts many would perceive the card as "stuttery", and the ATI's statement on the matter does not make me confident that it will be fixed.

One way which occurs to me in which this could have been avoided was putting some extra hardware on the card through which the data would pass to both frame buffers simultaneously. The rest of the system would see that component as the card's frame buffer instead of two separate memory areas, and it would act like a sort of a splitter, so there would only have to be one update cycle for the whole X2 instead of one for each of the frame buffers. Still, I'm not sure how "easy" to implement would this be and what other problems it would cause.

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