You know I'm genuinely surprised at how much knowledge people have on voodoo cards and glide , or obscure branded cards , but hardly anyone has a very good knowledge of old school crossfire. maybe someone here does and is waiting in the shadows to emerge. 🤣

I'm playing with a crossfire 2600 xt system I have and am running into some old school problems.

firstly , several games that are supposed to support crossfire from this era and even have official crossfire profiles don't work as they should. With a single card they work fine and the single card has 100% usage during the game , when activating crossfire rather then adding the second cards power it simply splits the difference between them. so both cards will run at 50% usage , which is pretty pointless as it yields the exact same frame rate as a single card. I can force different crossfire settings for these games but they usually end up in artifacts or worse performance. That being said , some games DO work fine and scale great. Borderlands for example literally doubles it frame rate in crossfire which is amazing to see. gta 4 run less crappy then it already runs simply due to it being a terrible port , but it is less crappy in crossfire. GRID runs much faster in crossfire. the thing I can see in these games is both gpu's being used 100% during the game.

I also tried the crysis demo which doesn't seem to like crossfire but that might be due to the fact that it's the demo.

Next , it seems these cards run slower in dx9 in crossfire. I'm wondering if this is down to these older cards using too new of driver on too new of windows (windows 7). should i be using windows Vista with these cards instead? I'd use xp which would be more period correct but it doesn't have dx 10 support.

I should also say I can recreate these problems using my 3870x2 as well. it's the same era and uses the same drivers and crossfire 2.0 system.