AMD has released information about a new incarnation of CrossFire, in an attempt to steal some attention from NVIDIA 3-way SLI. SLI and CrossFire are directly competing technologies which let users connect several graphics cards in the one and same systems. NVIDIA’s 3-way SLI is foremost for the extreme enthusiasts and, believe it or not, AMD’s Hybrid CrossFire is pretty much the exact opposite. The key is the word Hybrid, which points out that this is not a normal multi-GPU configuration with two or more discrete graphics cards, but with this one AMD has focused on the integrated graphics circuits.
Hybrid CrossFire makes it possible to connect a discrete graphics card with the integrated graphics chip of the AMD’s RS780 IGP chipset. AMD has displayed Hybrid CrossFire with its coming low-end graphics card RV620, which for $50 offers far from astonishing performance, but by activating CrossFire with the integrated graphics circuit, things start to move.
“Crysis truly is the “benchmark” of any current 3D video acceleration technology. With the RV620 video card alone, there simply was not going to be any Crysis gaming at any reasonable settings, but with Hybrid CrossFire enabled we were able to actually tweak out a Crysis configuration that would let you play the game at 1024×768 with most of the visual settings on “Medium.” Running the canned timedemo benchmarks supplied in the game, we saw Hybrid CrossFire give us 50% better framerates than with the single RV620 video card alone.”
Over at HardOCP they’ve published a preview of Hybrid CrossFire where they walk you through the basic concept and what the final result is in the form of a performance gain. Hybrid CrossFire is expected to arrive during Q1 2008 and actually seems like an interesting multi-GPU concept, which for once doesn’t require a fat wallet.
