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

[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

[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.

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! :-)

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

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.

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: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: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: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.

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.