CrossFire and SLI can offer some mighty graphics performance with through dual or quad setups of AMD’s or NVIDIA’s graphics cards. The poor compatibility is the perhaps biggest problem of the graphics card manufacturers’ multi-GPU technologies. AMD/ATI has support for CrossFire with all of its own chipsets , but also Intel’s P965 and 975X chipsets, while NVIDIA’s SLI technology is only supported by its own chipsets. Most of you have probably realized, since there are modified drivers, that this is not because of technical limitations but that the graphics card manufacturers simply want to keep the technology exclusive to its own platforms. Now it seems, to our great joy, that AMD is planning to open up its CrossFire technology to third-party manufacturers.
“As of this drafting stage, it’s told that for any chipset which boast two 16x PCI-E slots, CrossFire is already granted to be enabled. Therefore, not only Intel, VIA, SIS, and even NVIDIA’s chipset may able to support CrossFire, resulting in pushing the market share of CrossFire.”
This should make it easier for AMD/ATI owners to improve the performance of their systems with a CrossFire solution, while it at the same time it puts NVIDIA under pressure, since it’s already is a lot more restrictive with its SLI technology.
