ATI Crossfire previews

ATi Crossfire has been showing up more and more often in the news recently and now that ATi is at Computex to introduce the world to its “new” concept the headlines will most likely keep coming. We’ve a few articles discussing the theoretical performance of the system and the opinioins have been scattered allover whether ATi actually has something to battle nVidia’s SLI. Well noe a couple of sites has gotten their hands on an actual system and the thoughts are mainly positive even if there are a few “ifs and buts”.

A quite amusing feature you can use is you chose to get a CF-mainboard with integrated graphics and then chose to equip this with two X8XX-cards you can in theory have six monitors and still have the performance of a MVPU-system.

Anandtech’s article explains very well, with pictures, how ATi has designed its MVPU. Including the four new antialiasing-methods thatATi has developed for Crossfire. All of these can of courwse be accessed via the regular control panel.

You can also find this little snippet at the end:

“This chipset can be used on motherboards for Intel or AMD solutions and will provide 2 x16 physical, x8 electrical PCI Express slots for CrossFire support. ATI CrossFire-Edition motherboards could also support NVIDIA’s SLI cards if NVIDIA’s drivers were properly adapted.”

It seems though when using X800-cards you’re limited to combining it only with another X800, same goes for X850. it will only work with another X850-card. And one of the cards has to be a speial Master or “Crossfire edition” card. Although it is a relief ATi hasn’t limited itself to only one platform but both Intel and AMD-owners will be able to use Crossfire. Although it does seem almost to good to be true that you will be able to use nVidia-cards with ATi’s platform, but you have to admit the sheer thought is thrilling.

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