XFX's GeForce GTX 280 1GB XXX gives us a few more frames over a standard GTX 280, but none of the three graphics cards with have here would be able to play Crysis smoothly anyway, with the exception of 1680 x 1050 and 1920 x 1200 on High Quality.

Oddly, with the Catalyst 8.7 drivers, 2560 x 1600 resolution was unbenchable. It just took forever to render a couple of frames. If we didn't have the patience to keep an eye on the benchmark progress, we would have thought the system actually hung. We also experienced graphics corruption on the CrossFire setup and random lock-ups when that occured.

A comfortable bump in frame rates over the reference GeForce GTX 280 is seen here again, but the XFX GeForce GTX 280 1GB XXX still fails to par with the Radeon 4870 512MB in CrossFire.

Three is noticable improvement across the board when benching with the XFX GeForce GTX 280 1GB XXX. We are getting about 10% to 15% more performance over a reference GeForce GTX 280. Unfortunately at 670/1458/1250, that is still insufficient for the XFX card to come close to the ATI Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire.

Again, you can compare performance between the Catalyst 8.6 hotfix and Catalyst 8.7 WHQL driver sets by referring to our Graphics Slugfest: ATI Radeon HD 4850 CF, HD 4870, HD 4870 CF vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, GTX 280 article which was done with the former set of drivers.

A quick check with our graphs from the above-mentioned article shows that the XFX GeForce GTX 280 1GB XXX is able to take on an ATI Radeon 4850 512MB CrossFire setup. US$ 400 for the 4850 CrossFire, or about another US$ 100 or so more for the XFX XXX card but comes in the form of a single card and cooler operating temperatures by default?

There are performance differences between the two drivers - Catalyst 8.6 and 8.7, and in some scenarios the newer driver is faster, while in other scenarios the older driver is faster. In view of the random video corruption issues on our CrossFire setup, we would recommend that ATI users stick to the Catalyst 8.6 Hotfix drivers. We cannot comment on the Catalyst 8.7 for single cards as we have not used it for single card benchmarking.