How well does Crossfire perform for 2D?

[Linuxhippy]

Hi,

I plan to buy a AMD Trinity powered notebook soon - and to use Catalyst for the first 2 years until the open-source radeon driver matures a bit for this chipset.
What I am concerened about is, how well does Catalyst accelerate 2D operations now? I've tested Catalyst on a HD3850 about 2 years ago, and it fell back to software for almost everything - a real poor 2D driver. However, according to some rumors then, a new 2D acceleration architecture for Catalyst was developed ... so that should be included by now, right? (I remember there were some articles on phoronix about a switch to enable it).

Using an intel notebook for the past 5 years, I have been lately been very impressed by the intel driver's 2D performance with their SNA acceleration architecture - the radeon driver is quite lame using EXA (which likes to copy data between VRAM and RAM like mad), but I don't want to go back to a pure software-only 2D driver.

Thank you in advance, Clemens

PS: Please no AMD vs Intel, or Catalyst vs Nvidia flamewars.

PS2: Just found the article about the then-new 2D acceleration in Catalyst, does anybody know what happend to it? : http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...d_new_2d&num=1

[Linuxhippy]

come on ... please :/

[Kano]

CF has got no effect on 2d.

[nadro]

Yep, Crossfire can help You only with 3D, not with 2D. But for 2D one card is enough. For me 2D on each AMD card (I tested many cards from HD2400 PRO to HD6950) works really nice

[Linuxhippy]

Sorry my bad - I ment Catalyst of course.

Does Catalyst accelerate 2D operations?
I wonder how well it does in JXRenderMark, would be great if somebody could give it a short try: http://93.83.133.214/downloads/JXRenderMark-1.0.1.zip

Thanks, Clemens