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ATi's Multi-GPU CrossFire Graphics Card Unveiled
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."
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2432
Just thought would be good to add variety.
This is just in time. I'm sure many nex-gen games coming out will be transferred over to PC. This sort of begs the question. Slowly, the computer is becoming an all in one console. Next gen consoles may soon become useles.
PS- ATI, we need Linux drivers!
Avarus animus nullo satiatur lucro.
Before you waste your time on the same old tired "who needs it" posts, here's the answer:
Obviously not you.
Now stfu and be happy.
Yes I'm coming across as a troll here but I'm still pissed about having bought a 9200 and the need to fight it to get it working reasonably under linux. TV out should not have taken a days worth of work. Until ATI gets it together and starts releasing good drivers for something other then windows my cards will be nvidia.
...32 graphic chips!!!8 43.html
:-)
From TomsHardware http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050526_155
I will live on bread and water from now on to afford a system with this... in the far future!
At a speed where it can render the entire earth. at the string theory level at 80 FPS?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Crossfire != SLI
Crossfire is apparently scalable to 32 GPU's. So it probably won't be unheard of for graphics cards using Crossfire to have 2 or 3 GPU's and if you use dual graphics cards that means you could have a total of 4 or 6 GPU's balancing the load of a future game of Doom 4 or Half-Life 3!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Slowly, the computer is becoming an all in one console. Next gen consoles may soon become useles.
The same was said of the PC 10 years ago.
Do I have to wear abspestos to stand the heat?
Pretty Pictures!
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
ATI's *nix drivers are getting better (but still suck), but you are running a 9200, a POS card. Doubt you are doing much graphic intensive work on that card. So you really need to ask yourself, do you need this kind of power? If you want to upgrade to this system, be prepared to shell out the big bucks. I doubt it will support *nix for quite a while.
Now we've got loadbalancing GPUs. Which means cheap supercomputers, on a PCI LAN, in cheap P4 clients running the OS of our choice. Everyone overclocking your Pentium for more power: GPGPU is the cheapest way to get the fastest PC. First demo of a pool of parallel LAME process running on a stacked beast, let me know.
--
make install -not war
There's going to be a few problems with that:
Firstly, heat dissipation - a single GPU spews out enough heat as it is. Given that for some stupid reason GPUs point DOWN and thus the heat rises through the PCB itself, you're looking at a toasty machine.
Unless you want the card to be absolutely enormous like the dual nVidia GPU cards shown previously, the GPUs are going to have to share memory, which brings up all sorts of problems and bottlenecks also found in SMP solutions.
PCIe bandwidth is going to need to increase (ie more lanes) - you need to have all those things talking to the CPU!
Just my 2 cents anyway.
John Stewart will be getting this whole project cancelled in no time!
That ATI and Nvidia have cards out in production that are twice as powerful as any currently out but are holding back on any new innovation probably until well after the Consoles have sold.
ATI and Nvidia are selling out the PC Gamer's in hopes of pleasing the console makers so they can make even more money off our backs.
for something other then windows
Erm. So, ATI finally has their drivers working well for Windows?
Honestly, how many of you actually believe ATI is capable of making multiple GPUs work reliably? And on Linux?
Go ahead ATI fanbois, I can spare the karma.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Firstly, this entire article was obviously written from marketing material. No working and buyable Crossfire hardware currently exists. Secondly, the setup requires that you buy an ATI-licensed motherboard, which includes their proprietary audio, and so on. Have we now officially reached the point where the graphics hardware is booting and running the CPU, rather than the other way round? By the way, when 2 cards are installed, the PCI express bus speed gets divided between the two.
I have yet to use any video hardware that required an external dongle and still got decent throughput to the monitor. There was always some image degradation due to the passthrough. No matter how non-shoddy it was.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm holding out for version 2. I just don't see why you need an ati or nvidia chipset for this stuff. If you have a motherboard with 2 16x pci slots next to each other then just sell the connector bracket that includes the necessary logic. Also this current generation drops the 16x slots down to 2 8x slots. Next gen should give you 2 full speed 16x slots if nvidia follows through.
I refuse to get locked into either an ATI implementation or a Nvidia implementation. I want a MB with a chipset that I select to work with either one. Then in the future I can upgrade the 2 video cards to a different brand without having to change out everything else.
that they didn't bench Doom3?
The game itself might not have been as exciting at it first seemed but the engine surely is. Quake 4, EnemyTerritory: QuakeWars and I'm sure some other games also are based on Doom3.
don't get caught up in the... crossfire!
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
...ATI's forthcoming R520, with hardware H.264 codec support.
Imagine a Mac mini or laptop with that chipset...it will enable HD playback on a lot of hardware that wouldn't otherwise support it.
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.
I think it was Anandtech who did these tests when SLI first game out, using the latest nVidia card with Doom 3 back then at highest settings. 8x PCIe had no drop from 16x PCIe, neither did 4x PCIe. 2x PCIe had a 10% drop and 1x PCIe had a 25% drop.
"For the time being", I think 16x PCIe is doing "just fine".
... and in the DRM, bind them.
When they finally write DECENT drivers then I will be impressed. As it is the official drivers are buggy and dual monitor support is absolute crap compared to nVidia's drivers.
Lets not talk about load balancing between cards, ATi can't even get scaling one desktop over 2 momnitors right. And thats if you can get monitor #2 to detect, which is still a hit or miss affair with the official drivers.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
If I understand correctly, the reason that dual cores cpus are coming onto the market is because it is becoming increasingly more difficult to make single core cpus faster.
Is that also the case with GPUs? Or do they still have a ways to go in terms of single-core speed improvements?
I wouldn't think this would be a problem with DVI. I know I hated my Voodoo2 for this reason, but that was Analog VGA -> Ditigal -> Analog VGA. Is there something I'm missing that would effect a Digitial -> Digital -> Digital solution?
jeez, if you want to still carry on with 5 year out of date arguments then of course nvidia can make better drivers if they pre-render your benchmark tests for you.
Read the marketing spam bit more carefully.
Nowhere is it stated that ATI chipset motherboard is *Required*. Instead, the the term 'optimal' is used.
Translation from marketing bullshit: ATI Xpress 200 Crossfire = clone of NForce 4 SLI. Unless they want to shoot their leg by restricting it at drivers, their implementation on the motherboard side of things seems identical. I do hear that nVidia isn't allowing SLI on their drivers with anything except nVidia NForce 4 chipset (tho 'support for Intel chipsets' is coming, I hear).
If it actually would require ATI chipset, they would've stated so clearly. Instead if you read the fine articles, nowhere it is claimed to be a *requirement*.
Well seeing as I've had 0 driver problems since I first got my 8500 I'd say they are working pretty good. It's not like Nvidia drivers are all that pristine anyways. I've seen issues with both manufacturer's cards and 9 times out of 10 it's not the drivers that are the cause but the user or rarely the hardware.
And "optimal" means if it doesn't work on a competitors board then we won't work as hard to fix the drivers to make it work. Aka, buy it from us to actually get it working to its full potential.
ASUS, DFI, MSI etc are not competitors of ATI. They are important partners. I'm quite sure ATI will lick ASUS's boots with whatever fix is required so that ASUS customers stay happy and ASUS sells lots of ASUS-branded Crossfire cards to the *existing installed base* of NF4 SLI + X800/X850 users. Sure they'll tell the clueless people that a new ATI chipset motherboard is the 'optimal' solution, but pissing off their prime customer base of technically savy too-rich ubergamers who already forked out a ton for that A8N-SLI seems to me like a true Bonehead Manouver. Since ATI is late, they really can't afford to be picky.
I'm quite sure that while nVidia might be unhappy that ATI is 'using' nVidia's chipset SLI boards with their cards like this, the big motherboard makers just want things to work and be compatible. So unless there is a real technical reason why not, it'll work. Unless nVidia wants to commit a commercial suicide and prevent it at chipset driver level (and that would be kinda blatant...)
ATI has been doing multi-GPU since the R300. Evans and Sutherland has been using multiple GPUs to provide rock-solid frame rates and 24x anti-aliasing for military simulators. ATI have been considering multi-GPU for longer than nVidia and I suspect their consumer solutions will be much more robust and thought out than SLI.
They sell a motherboard that is to be used with a new technology. They also include PCI slots for good measure. The damn video cards completely cover the 2 PCI slots, why are they there in the first place?
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Seems to me that a dual core gpu (or 2+ cores for that matter) would make more sense then 2 cards? Why can't they make these cards multicore?
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
The dual nVIDIA GPU cards enormous? You should take a look at some old pictures of 3Dfx Voodoo5 6000 some time :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Do you think the more widespread use of high speed Internet and sites like Kazaa and BitTorrent locations are part of the cause. It is pretty easy to go download a commerical game, even if it might take all day to get a couple gigs worth of data.
I think the two main problems are buggy software and lack of innovation. They just keep polishing and repackaging the same old stuff.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Crossfire
CROSSFIRYAAAAAHHHHHH
(reference to an old commercial for those who don't know)
Photos.
Linux + Nvidia driver (with RenderAccel disabled) is damn stable.
ATI about 2-3 year ago has earned a reputation that they have really bad drivers. I believe that even Carmack has mentioned that he will only do development on nvidia, as the ATI's were too unpredictable. I believe the situation has changed but not for linux drivers.
Ati linux drivers are the same nightmare they used to be. Some cards are supported, others are not. In general it is a mess.
As far as your "F*CKING WORKS" comment...all I have to say is that it is not the case in my experience. One of the latest computers that I have configured for windows (Dad's Windows XP machine, hard drive with XP installed from the previous box) appears to not like AGP video. I booted Windows, and it freezes upon entering graphics mode. I started knoppix -- no problems. Windows -- freezes at entering graphics mode. Plugged in a different card - same result. Windows freezes at entering graphics mode. Fine, I immediately think that the windows is wrongly using the old configuration that is on the hard drive to start graphics, and is freezing. Here is the kicker...I decided to reinstall Windows only to have the installer freeze completely when entering graphics mode. Same result with the SP2 disc that I have bootlegged (The version I was installing was legit in fact).
I expected there would probably be bios flash for something like this, but no such new bios was available...and no one was reporting the same problem. The eventual workaround involved this: tell the bios to boot a pci graphics card first, and have any cheap pci card sitting there. Then tell windows that the agp card is the main desktop one and ignore the other card. That worked perfectly.
Total time spent to research, tinker, and workaround the problem: 4 days, with few breaks. I am persistent like that. Unfortunately that is more time than I have spent on configuring linux boxes in the last year or two.
And although the Plug and Pray experience of installing ISA modems did go away (mostly due to modems going away, I am sure the OS is still full of bugs in that respect), there is still plenty of fun to go around. Like the new vendor drivers versus generic drivers fighting each other. The SCSI card that the scanner uses disabling the CD drives, as in they are visible, but no longer send any media status info. Microphone on the card stopped working about a year and a half ago due to a generic driver update, and creative just says use generic driver.
Plenty of fun to go around when using windows boxes.
badness 10000
Whoever modded this redundant, I posted it at the same time as the first one...
Will this one will actually work with NT based OSs?
(bonus points for anyone who 'gets this')
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
So I don't follow these things too closely, but the way I heard it, the ATI card that the XBox 360 and Nintendo Revolution will be using derivatives of started its life as a PC card, but got the axe when it proved to be cost-inefficient, and wouldn't be hitting market at all at this point if it weren't for the consoles; and the NVidia chippy thing that the PS3 GPU is based off of actually IS outright coming to PCs as a retail product and will apparently be shown at Computex or whatever it's called this week.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Damn, I just barely started making 2D games that use the 3D card for rotation, blending, zooms and stuff. Great, what am I going to do with all this now ;)
--
Cartoon miniature golf game for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/
That is quite contrary to the latest issue of PC Gamer.
In the July issue (with Civ IV on the cover) they do an Eyewitness report on a game developer's conference. One very vocal developer talks about how most game developers simply view the PC as the "4th console" and as a result most of the games are designed around dedicated consoles first before being ported to the PC.
While the PC still has some dedicated games (Far Cry, Half Life 2, EverQuest, WoW etc) most games are now just being ported over. IE - the PC Gaming market is losing ground against the console market.
OOOOH let me buy an ATI board so i cant run linux at all
When will GPU manufacturers realize that they have reached the limit of current technology? For example, why can't they integrate the GPU into the motherboard? Think of the possibilities- Give the GPU its own socket (like the CPU), and its own memory bank (also like the CPU). Not only would this solve power problems and cooling problems, but it would mean that when you needed to upgrade the GPU you wouldn't have to buy a whole new set of memory with it (not to mention all of the other circuitry found on graphics cards). Give the GPU a direct link to the CPU (much like a dual-CPU setup) and you have also solved all of your bandwidth problems. You might even be able to set up a four socket motherboard and fill the sockets according to your needs- If you are a heavy gamer you could put in one CPU and three GPUs (This assumes that the GPUs would use the same socket and protocols as the CPU). If you are someone who needs the processing power alone, you could put in four CPUs and use a cheaper PCI GPU. I understand that this would require radical changes to the power supply and motherboard standards, but if NVidia and ATi are already making the chipsets, would it really be all that hard for them to convince the motherboard manufacturers to completely change their products to suit the new standards?
I, for one, welcome our new karma-whore sig writing overlords
Especially after you have that drink.
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
a system that can run PCSX2 ;) maybe now we'll get more people developing ps2 emulators ;)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
... are that many of them are pretty dern alike, and there are limited genres within. Yet, this is why they sell. People like buying every GTA game, every run-and-shoot platformer, all the nearly identical FPS games. Until there start to be strategy games (I love Galactic Civilization and Sim City 4), moddable games, online games like Tribes/Tribes 2/Battlefield/BF2/Others that have a real good amount of depth (and should be possible with the increased console RAM), and etc., several PC gamers will stubbornly own just a PC or both.
I don't see how these types of games aren't possible anymore. TVs are at HD, allowing strategy games to work better. At least one of the consoles is using standard USB (hello keyboards/mice). They'll have harddrives, they'll have lots of RAM, they'll have downloadable things. I'm just hoping we don't get more of these simplisitc console games this time around (not that all are like that, just >90%), which is exactly what I hoped last time.
Also why I'm looking (bit doubtfully) at Nintendo, since they make completely insane things that work only as console games and aren't like shallow versions of PC genres.
ATi has traditionally had poor OpenGL performance, now this:
"It has come to our attention that the "small number of applications" for which Supertiling does not work includes all OpenGL based titles."
I wonder how much ATi's cosy relationship with MSFT has to do with this?
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Behold the BTX Form Factor
DCMonkey
I wonder if GPUs point downwards on cards because they are typically right beside the CPU Heatsink.
Maybe its because its just the way it was traditionally done, before tower-style casings became the norm.
Any EEs care to explain why reference designs place the GPU and its cooling solution on the underside?
The ATi dual GPU cards are also ginormous. Just check out the pix on HotHardware. A CrossFire enabled X850 is two slots with another two slots taken by the CrossFire.
-]Phreak Out[-
This would not have helped here...as any configuration (including the setup from the CD) was crashing.
Obviously Windows did something that the motherboard did not like.
badness 10000