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So, what do all these benchmarks show us?

For starters, it seems that the belated age of multi-GPU performance in Vista has begun -- but it's still in its infancy.

As of the time of writing of this article (mid-September, 2007), all indication seem to point towards SLI having better driver support than CrossFire. After looking through all the benchmarks, it would be hard to claim otherwise. The only game that benefited from CrossFire support was Lost Planet -- and even then, there was image corruption. Enabling CrossFire actually resulted in a loss of game performance, more often than not, including in the possible PC game-of-the-year, Bioshock. Judging from these numbers, there are probably more than a handful of gamers out there who own two HD 2900 XT's, and are not very impressed by the situation. 

But -- if you do own 2 HD 2900 XT's, don't rush out and sell them just yet. The CrossFire-enabling Vista patches are still quite new -- it is very likely that somewhere in Markham, Ontario,  ATI/AMD's driver team is hard at work, trying to smooth out the CrossFire problems.

As for SLI in Vista: things look good. SLI seems ready to meet the big upcoming DX10 titles (i.e Crysis). It is even conceivable that someone shopping for a new gaming rig right now could consider buying a pair of 8800 GTS's over a single 8800 GTX. The BFG 8800 GTS's running in SLI out-performed our Asus EN8800 GTX in Lost Planet, Call of Juarez, and Bioshock. Prices always fluctuate, but according to most online retailers right now, a pair of 8800 GTS cards would cost only between $50 and $100 more than a single 8800 GTX.  

Vista and DX10 have been out for about 8 months now -- so it's good to finally see that SLI, and to a far lesser extent CrossFire, have made to the party.