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."

Comments

Anandtech also has a review

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Just thought would be good to add variety.

Awesome

[Keystroker]

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!

Re:Awesome

[RaboKrabekian]

Slowly, the computer is becoming an all in one console. Next gen consoles may soon become useles.

So all the new consoles are announced and everyone thinks PC gaming is doomed.

New video cards are announced and people thing console gaming is doomed.

Which is it?! TELL ME WHAT TO THINK!!!

Inf act there will always be consoles/dedicated gaming machines AND a market for games played on PCs. Wow, that was hard.

Re:Awesome

[fr0dicus]

Meanwhile, on planet Earth, the PC gaming market shrinks every year, as even Microsoft shift focus to games consoles.

Re:Awesome

[NanoGator]

" 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."

The opposite could just as easily be said. Next gen systems are rivaling PC's. Slowly, PC games will move over to consoles.

Frankly, either prediction is silly. The sole difference between PC's and consoles isn't the graphic power. There are a set of trade-offs for either platform. The PC, for example, requires up to date hardware, doesn't have a standard controller, and often requires a lot of configuration to get going. The game console, however has, standard hardware, no installation BS, games designed to play on the lowes common denominator, and a multi-purpose controller. One you'll happily play Quake on, the other you'll happily play Zelda on.

Me personally, I'm not thrilled with PC gaming anymore. Too much hassle with too little payoff. Maybe I'm just busier than I used to be, but I like the idea of a $200 box I can just hook up to the TV, pop a disc in, and play.

Re:Awesome

[Espectr0]

Meanwhile, on planet Earth, the PC gaming market shrinks every year, as even Microsoft shift focus to games consoles.


And then PC users get only console ports, which are badly done, therefore no one wants to buy PC games, making the problem worse every year.

Re:Awesome

[AviLazar]

Another few reasons why there will be both:

Consoles are more user friendly - virtually no crashing...requiring no loading or advanced configuartion

PCs are more customizable, can do other things (i.e. you can type your homework on it), and are not so locked up.


Some people, also, cannot afford both. Maybe someone can afford to spend 1200 on a bangin gaming machine...but they may not be able to afford that 1200 piece of hardware and an additional 400-600 console.

There will be a market for both in the near future, and even mid future (5-10 years)... Maybe past 10 years these devices will merge...but oh wait they will just be PC's marketed as consoles...maybe you can do less upgrades to them.

Re:Awesome

[Dragoon412]

I don't think that the assumption that consoles will soon kill off PC gaming is all that far fetched. Why?

(And keep in mind, I'm a very staunch PC gamer that's had and subsequently traded in all 3 current consoles because I find their games to be so shallow and short-lived).

The PC really has two advantages over consoles, and neither is specific to the PC itself: the control scheme (I love gamepads and all, but they simply can't compete with the level of precision and complexity a keyboard and mouse offer in many situations), and display technology.

Well, HDTV is rapidly becoming more commonplace. 1080p displays put more pixels on the screen than all but the highest-end PC monitors. And really, how difficult would it be to make a mouse, trackball, keyboard, or some sort of high-precision gamepad controller?

To compete with console gaming, PCs need to eliminate the hassle (and especially the "release it broken and patch it later" mindset so many distributors have), eliminate the bugs and compatibility issues, and simplify installation. Quite a lofty goal, to be honest.

What do consoles need to match the PC? A hard drive? Already happening. Better displays? Already happening. Better conrol mechanisms? Trivial. Throw in a Knoppix-like disk-bootable set of utilities with an office suite, web browser, etc, and what's the PC got left?

I think in terms of gaming nirvana, the console's beginning to step on the PC's toes. The next generation of them (the one after the PS3/360/Revolution) may very well have me, a long-time PC gamer that can't stand consoles, scratching my head, asking myself "...why do I want to spend $500 on this GeForce 8900 again?"

Re:Awesome

[bluk]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/26/news_61265 52.html

GameSpot's quarterly report said PC sales were down, and that they only account for 4% of sales. You could argue that PC sales remained the same and console related sales skyrocketed, but this is the tail end of a console generation when people are usually saving up money for the next console.

Since GameSpot doesn't sell PCs that I know of and console hardware sales are around 20% from that same report, you can venture that roughly 70% of sales are from console games. That's a staggering number from the number one games only retailer.

But really, just look at your Walmart and Best Buy. Console games store space take up at least 2 times as much space as PC game titles. Look at the sheer number of console games too compared to PC games. Ever wonder why companies like Epic are moving to console games and supporting those platforms? It's not a big mystery why console games outsell PC games.

Re:Awesome

[0111 1110]

You forgot to mention that most console games are still targeted at child gamers. I realize that thirty-somethings like myself are a minority in the gaming market, but for us hardware comparisons are largely irrelavent. Even if/when consoles add qwerty keyboards and monitor connections, there really is (almost) nothing for us to play.

I already went through that arcade game phase with Atari 2600 and Atari 400/800 (or Apple II) games in the early 80s and again with IBM PC first person shooter games (i.e. Wolf3D) in the early 90s. I played Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Frogger, and Pole Position and enjoyed them when I was ten. Although even as a preteen I found them kind of boring. I prefered Archon, Castle Wolfenstein, Choplifter, and Crush, Crumble and Chomp. I could play those for hours. Graphics have improved by orders of magnitude but gameplay has mostly stayed the same. That sort of gameplay is great when you are 12. It is much easier to entertain children. Games aimed at a younger crowd don't need to be as sophisticated overall and are much cheaper to make.

There are (still) hardware differences of course. Even the best computer monitors are much cheaper (and smaller/lighter) than 1080p HDTVs and keyboards are useful for complex games. Display-wise game machines should really have moved on to autostereoscopic LCD monitors, HMDs with head trackers, shutter glasses, and other immersive gaming options that are relatively easy to do on a dedicated gaming machine. NTSC televisions are display technology from the 1960s (PAL is only slightly more advanced). Great for hooking up an Atari 2600 to play Pong or Breakout but completely ridiculous as a display for the kind of graphics technology in an Xbox 360 or PS3. Juvenile clickfest, hand-eye coordination exercises, displayed on a grainy, flickering, TV just don't hold much interest for me anymore.

Who needs a card that...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Crossfire may be able to support up to ...

[guyfromindia]

...32 graphic chips!!!
From TomsHardware http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050526_1558 43.html

I will live on bread and water from now on to afford a system with this... in the far future! :-)

When will a GPU Be Good enough.

[jellomizer]

At a speed where it can render the entire earth. at the string theory level at 80 FPS?

Re:When will a GPU Be Good enough.

[FauxPasIII]

> We don't need to get beyond what human eyes can
see.

Tell it to the people who insist on a sustained 200fps whilst running their monitors are
retracing at 85hz.

Re:When will a GPU Be Good enough.

[SamSim]

I've got a simulator running which renders the entire Earth at string theory level at 10^34 FPS.

Unfortunately it's in use at the moment.

Re:When will a GPU Be Good enough.

[blahplusplus]

>>>> We don't need to get beyond what human eyes can
see.

>> Tell it to the people who insist on a sustained 200fps whilst running their monitors are
retracing at 85hz.

Me: It's not about the retrace or pure benchmark "framerate", it's about the framerate spikes that are constantly fluctuating depending on what is happening in the game that occur during playing the game fully loaded with big battles, and beutiful models, textures and environments. In my opinion this is because games, gaming hardware have no "Quality of Service" standards.

Imagine, its similar to when on a network you your ping is low while you're not doing anything besides playing the game, but try to play a game and download a movie off bit-torrent and the data rate and trip time for the games packets suddenly spike skyhigh making your experience from frustrating to bad to unusable. Games have a similar problem where they cannot predict the throughput and amount of data to and from wherever that data is going, and the bottle necks and texture thrashing cause framerate hitches in the game.

Sure you have 100 or 200 fps in a room with no enemies or explosions going on, but then bam, down to 30-50 fps once you get a room full of people and enemies and their projectiles nad special effects animating all at once, all on the same screen in real time. So when you see high FPS scores just remember, It's about a cards ability to handle the immense load of random models and spells, effects, etc of animated (and non-animateD) models, geoemetry and textures during a actions scenes that have a lot going on in them.

Just benchmark some of the most punishing amounts of players on the same screen at once in modern MMO's or the bigger multiplayers games and you start to realize it's about what kind of load the video card can handle and keep things playable for when things get hectic (and the most fun).

Re:So?

[StarWreck]

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!

How funny.

[Spy der Mann]

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.

HardOCP and brief overview

[IronChefMorimoto]

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

HyperComputer

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:So?

[rpozz]

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.

version 1 of this dual gpu stuff just isn't there

[Zed2K]

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.

No ATI board *required*

[Jarnis]

"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.

Re:I'm a bit cynical...

[merlin_jim]

By the way, when 2 cards are installed, the PCI express bus speed gets divided between the two.

BTW, PCI devices all share the same bus.

Same with ISA and VLB.

I guess that's why it's called a bus.

PCIe at least has the advantage of offering switching, meaning if you have multiple communications going on simultaneously, they're not necessarily all waiting on each other (though I don't think that's going to be very useful in a real world environment)

The only graphics interface format that ever dedicated bandwidth is AGP... but fun multi-GPU tricks aren't possible there.

Honestly, I don't think the bus speed is the bottleneck on PCIe... I think that a top of the line comp today has more graphics bus than it can use (which of course is exactly the condition you want)... I think the fundamental limiter is the CPU in a lot of titles... and the GPU in everything else.

Re:How do you feel?

[Xugumad]

Certainly, the X-Box 360 demos were all all run on PowerMacs with X800 cards, not any kind of next gen hardware.

ATi did actually have a demo of their next-gen R520 at E3, which should be launched later this year (a time frame that at worst puts it in line with X-Box 360). No news from Nvidia on the GF70, from what I can tell, but I'd imagine they'll try to launch around the same time as ATi.

Anyway, if you've been following the graphics card market (which you really should if you're thinking of buying a multi-GPU rig), you'd know that new cards are released regularly, and that their power doubles every 18 months or so. This stuff should suprise no-one these days.

Wasted space

[oskard]

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?

Re:Multi-GPU out of necessity? or something else

[TheRaven64]

Disclaimer: This post contains oversimplifications.

Not really. Making GPUs faster is relatively trivial - just add more pipelines. There is very little in the rendering process that can't be excessively parallelised. Vertex shaders will only get into diminishing returns once there is one vertex shader pipeline per vertex (well, per primitive). Pixel shader pipelines will only get into diminishing returns once there is one per pixel. Other components can easily be parallelised more (e.g. compositing) by splitting up the screen into smaller fragments (not quite a linear speed-up, because of overlaps, but a significant one).

The problem is fitting all of these pipelines into an IC that doesn't spontaneously ignite when you remove it from the liquid nitrogen tank. Multi-GPU solutions step around this problem by putting some of the pipelines in a different package, so the cooling required is spread between two physical packages.

CPUs are different. They are designed for performing inherently serial calculations (while GPUs are inherently parallel). This means that doubling the speed of a CPU becomes increasingly difficult every time it is done, until eventually it will be impossible[1]. Dual Cores are a way to side step this, by making CPUs more parallel.

[1] This has been Real Soon Now(tm) for about 20 year, but isn't here quite yet, although we are seeing the first serious hurdles.

Re:Fine but does it run under...

[NotoriousQ]

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.

Dual GPU's ehh?

[toadlife]

Will this one will actually work with NT based OSs?

(bonus points for anyone who 'gets this')

Re:Dual Core Gpus?????

[tomstdenis]

Because they're not as hand-designed as processors are. For the most part GPUs are written in higher level ASIC tools [e.g. verilog/vhdl] which then filter through the tool chains [automatic...] with some human intervention along the way.

The benefit is that they can produce a graphics card in half the time [hint: the last significant AMD change in terms of logic was from the K6 to the K7...] as a typical CPU like an x86 but the downside is they're less efficient.

Processors are written with high level tools but there is much more human intervention before it goes to tapeout.

The software analogy would be comparing someone who goes from C to binary to someone who goes from C to assembly, tweaks it and then to binary.

Tom