Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

ATi's Multi-GPU CrossFire Graphics Card Unveiled

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the two-for-the-price-of-what dept.

MojoDog writes "ATi has unveiled their new Multi-GPU technology dubbed "CrossFire" today out at the Computex show in Taiwan. HotHardware has a full preview of the technology, which requires both a Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire based motherboard and a CrossFire graphics card, in addition to another Radeon X800 series PCI Express card, for dual 3D Graphics processing with three available types of load balancing. CrossFire supports Split-Screen, Alternate Frame Rendering and SuperTiling mode load balancing between the GPUs."

3 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Anandtech also has a review by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2432

    Just thought would be good to add variety.

  2. HardOCP and brief overview by IronChefMorimoto · · Score: 4, Informative

    HardOCP (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Nzc4) also has a decent preview. If you look down the list of the various news items for today, the [H] has included links to other previews. Also, they have some photographs from CompuTex (???) in Taipei from this week.

    I skimmed both the Anandtech and HardOCP articles, and the basic gist about ATI's "SLI" is:

    - needs an ATI chipset (the 200 -- for both Intel and AMD right now)
    - "SLI" connector is external via some sort of weird DVI dongle
    - uses one (1) existing X800 or X850 flavor card + a special CrossFire edition of same card models = no real need to get TWO CrossFire cards at one time if you already have the above models

    Looks like I'm gonna need a monster case to ever be able to do this setup (ATI's demos at CompuTex take up 4 friggin' slots on the back of a case).

    IronChefMorimoto

  3. No ATI board *required* by Jarnis · · Score: 4, Informative
    "which requires both a Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire based motherboard and a CrossFire graphics card"

    Wrong. Instead they stated that the 'optimum' platform is the Xpress 200 CrossFire.

    However, between the marketing bullshit, you can clearly see that the motherboard is just a dupe of NForce4 SLI (and of similar Intel chipset coming up). Exact same PCIE setup. So it's almost certain that CrossFire will run just fine on nVidia chipset SLI motherboards.

    I doubt they'd do a commercial suicide to prevent it on driver side. Today ATI has 0 SLI boards out. Nvidia has a gazillion - many of which are currently running X800/X850 cards. Nforce4 was first working PCIE AMD chipset, so many bought it - even the more expensive A8N-SLI or similar from other manufacturers, because nothing else was available at the time. Then they noticed how sucky the 6800GT/Ultra drivers currently are (stuutttteeerr bug in EQ2 comes to mind) and decided to fill the board with top of the line ATI card.

    Such people are the PRIME candidates for forking out extra 500$+ for a CrossFire card, and I'm quite sure that they'll want the money from these people WITHOUT forcing upon them a crappy unproven ATI chipset based motherboard.

    Now I do admit that ATI has been very elusive about this in their marketing material (ahem, I mean 'exclusive previews'), but if you go over them all, nowhere it says the thing *requires* ATI chipset, and I'm quite sure that detail is missing for a very good reason - they are late to the party on the motherboard side, and their system is exactly same (two x16 slots, running at x8 mode), that doing it any other way would be just silly.