ATI's Multi-Chip Solution: CrossFire

[DrDevin]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2432

Motherboards based around CrossFire will feature 2 physical PCI Express x16 slots with x8 electrical connections. If the motherboard manufacturer implements it, the second PCI Express slot does not require a selector card and can be used with any other x8 or lower device. When only one graphics card is installed, the BIOS is capable of reconfiguring dynamically the number of lanes that the PCI Express slots run.

CrossFire solution is capable of running cards with two different (and even different speed) GPUs.

One of ATI's most interesting claims with their CrossFire solution is that you no longer need the selector card that is seen on nForce4 SLI motherboards.

Option 1 - Terminator Card
Option 2 - SLI Selector Card
Option 3 - Selector ICs

ATI is able to handle SSAA by rendering the entire scene at the desired resolution on each card with a half pixel diagonal shift. They combine this method with either their 8x or 12x MSAA modes in order to produce 10xAA (4x + 4x + 2xSS) and 14xAA (6x + 6x + 2xSS). These quality modes should prove to be phenomenal.

Looks like it is better then NVIDIAs solution but it did have a lot of time to make improvements. Read the article for full details. I am looking forward to the 14X AA and easier implimintation.

 

[Asus]

The awesome thing about it...it works on all games not just a select few unlike SLI.

 

[Kazuki_Fuse]

Well Im sold. Cant wait for ATI's next gen card offering.

 

[duffers20]

If Ati market this right, then they are onto a winner! Those benchmark results are pretty impressive!

 

[NikolaX]

One excellent feature of the Xpress 200 CrossFire system is that, on boards where the OEM has included integrated graphics and two display outputs, 6 displays can be driven simultaneously (two from the integrated graphics, two from the standard Radeon, and two from the CrossFire card)

WOW.
i am waiting for Xpress 200 CrossFire , f*** nForce4 !

 

[jonbob]

The problem, as I see it, is that people with current 8-series cards won't benefit from this in the slightest. More power to ATI for making it work, but at least nvidia cards were launched with SLI.

 

[J_Tweedy]

well, twin gfx cards is still imo a waste of money for the performance benefits you receive. Far better investing in dual channel RAM or a better cpu.

 

[jonbob]

I wouldn't say it was a waste of time, just a less elegant solution to the problem.

 

[duffers20]

The benchmarks might not show a huge improvement, but the drivers will still be in development and when they become better, the scores should increase. It was the same with SLi when it first came out, the results were alright, but not worth upgrading to. We will just have to wait and see when better drivers are created etc to see if the scores & FPS in games rise by much more.

 

[holydeadpenguins]

It's cool that you can pair up a x800xt with an x800xl.

 

[DrDevin]

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2433&p=1

ATI Demos R520, Accelerates H.264 Decoding

The H.264 specification is particularly important as it will be the predominant encoding/decoding standard for both blu-ray and HD-DVD. Being able to accelerate H.264 encoding, decoding and transcoding will soon be the new focus of system performance. If you've played around with either encoding H.264 content or playing back the limited amount of H.264 content currently available, you know that the overall system demands for anything dealing with H.264 are quite high.

ATI is addressing one part of the problem by offering GPU-accelerated H.264 decoding with the R520. The demo was conducted on 25Mbps HD footage recorded using a HD video camera and played back on a Pentium 4 3.6GHz system (Hyper Threading enabled) with a R520 graphics card.

CPU utilization without the GPU acceleration enabled was stated to be between 90 - 95%, but when GPU accelerated H.264 decode was enabled the CPU utilization dropped to around 33%. We witnessed the GPU-accelerated playback first hand and were quite impressed.

ATI has committed to us that they would have a H.264 player available by the end of this year that would offer this level of acceleration when paired with a R520 GPU. ATI said they were looking into bringing the acceleration to older GPUs, but they would not say anything beyond that.

I think it is great that they will accelerate H.264 video as my personal experience with the geforce 6 series video decoding (especially HD WMV) is great. My cpu could not play the videos smoothly until I installed a 6600GT.

 

[bryanf445]

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=82831

why not look before you post