Introduction

"Are we there yet?" "Almost, just one minor tweak left and we're golden!" -- that pretty much describes the rather procrastinated route we took to writing this article.  Its first iteration was more or less complete back in November, and there was just this one extra thing to squeeze in, and then another....

The end result is 2 parts Cypress performance evaluation, 1 part new driver analysis and a sprinkling of something new we're looking at doing long term, with the driver analysis hastening release.  If you cast your mind back to July 2006, you'll recall Terry Makedon admitting that it was taking ATI longer than they had planned to get a Crossfire profile system into the driver controls.  Now, almost 4 years later, they're finally getting there.  Well, sort of.

The sprinkling of something new is the one that was the most exciting to deliver, and it's something we're looking at doing far more extensively in the future, since it's the beginnings of the direction we want to take these analysis pieces.  It's also a tad late because of Fermi, since figuring out how to measure one facet of modern D3D11 chips had to be fleshed out in a more tangible way with Cypress first.  A dry run of sorts.

Anyway, Cypress performance is the name of the game for this piece, so let's get stuck in, starting with what we used to test everything.