ATi CrossFire has been waiting long enough to come out in the light and now the multi-GPU platform has finally arrived. CrossFire is ATi’s reply to nVidia’s technology SLI. You simply connect two graphic cards in the same computer so that in theory you will have twice as much power. When it comes to pure performance there has only been one option earlier, nVidia’s SLI-technology, and it hasn’t been late with pointing that out over and over and over again. ATi has been working hard on making CrossFire a true competitor to SLI.
ATi has done a great job considering what it started with and the performance with Crossfire scales well when you connect an extra graphic card, and the new antialiasing mode SuperAA is a great addition. Unfortunately there are letdowns, where the limited resolution is probably the biggest. As the rumour said today’s CrossFire-system can’t handle resolutions higher than 1600×1200 at 60Hz, which especially CRT-users will curse more than once over. This limit might be removed with the introduction of R520, but we don’t know that for sure.
CrossFire doesn’t give an increase withi “all games” whcih it was claimed, games without Catalyst A.I. profiles usually don’t get any increase what-so-ever when runnign CrossFire. It is obvious that ATi needs, just as nVidia had to, let the platform grow and mature but unfortunately ATi is already behind and really don’t have the time.
The increase in performance with CrossFire is overall good, but today there is no card that can compete with nVidia’s SLI-system where the 7800-series is king of the hill. A lot seems to hang on ATi’s next generation of graphic circuits.
“Ultimately, these things shake down to a few essential truths. As a whole platform or solution, CrossFire isn’t as good as SLI, but it’s probably good enough. CrossFire’s true fate and desirability will be more than likely determined by ATI’s next generation of GPUs and by the master cards that will go with them. If those products are good, CrossFire should succeed. If they’re not, folks will probably decide that CrossFire isn’t worth the hassle.”
Reviews:
:: Tech Report ::
